A cog outside the machine

My  name is Tindyebwa Agaba. I am twenty four years old and have a BA in  Politics and International Relations from Exeter University and an MA in  Human Rights Law from SOAS (the School of Oriental and African  Studies). I graduated in autumn of 2010 and have yet to find meaningful  paid employment. As we all know, it is a very hard time for graduates at  the moment, but, as I hope to show in this article, also a very  exciting time: gone are the days of people with degrees slipping into  highly-paid jobs in large organizations (you may be lucky to get an  unpaid internship), so what is the alternative to stacking shelves in your local Tesco’s?

On leaving SOAS, I had the dream of becoming a human rights activist. I applied for many positions  with organisations and companies in the UK who were happy to abuse  fresh and enthusiastic graduates – luring them with the belief that they  will become permanent staff at the end of their respective programmes. I  took up an unpaid programme in Cairo where I was tasked to legally  represent refugees in the UNHCR tribunals.

It  was an amazing privilege for me to be able to spend 6 months living and  working in the Middle East. Even more amazing was witnessing first hand  the Arab Spring – being in Tahrir Square, watching Mubarak fall from  power and the people lose their decades of fear and find their voice.  What was most striking for me, however, was seeing how large  organizations work on the ground. How inhumane, how disinterested, how  one can feel like a tiny cog in a huge machine that’s out of control.

Cairo  is a “hub” for refugees from the Horn of Africa – a city where  displaced people are processed and their legal status determined. The  backlog of cases is unimaginably large; the process unimaginably long  and brutal, the lack of welfare for refugees corners them into  submission and many ‘voluntarily’ return to their country where they had  fled violence and persecution. My job was to process claims, write  appeals and represent asylum seekers in the UN tribunals.  

In  all honesty, this experience fell short of what I expected human rights  activism to be. The UNHCR-Cairo is massively financially  under-resourced and its budget has steadily declined since 1999; this  leads to a woefully untrained local staff, an insurmountable backlog of  cases and thus the poor people who eventually find themselves within the  system are met with tired, overwhelmed, stressed and potentially  inhumane advocates. I know this is better than nothing and I know many  people within the organization work with all their heart and soul, but I  found myself feeling that I was unable to put a finger on anything  tangible I had been able to achieve, that the sheer size of the outfit  swallowed up my personal input.

So how can my personal input make a difference? How can I combine my personality and my academic qualifications?

I  am originally from Rwanda. When I was 13 years old, I witnessed first  hand and participated in conflict on the Rwandan/DRC borders. I managed  to escape and when I was 16, was brought to Britain by a charity, where I  resumed my halted education.

I  was vividly reminded of my own childhood experiences when I visited  Liberia in 2010, making a trip for the charity ActionAid. There I met  Child Soldiers who had fought in the civil war that had come to an end  in 2003. They had no significant education at all but they were buzzing  with all sorts of talents, enthusiasm and ambition, but lacking one  thing: opportunity. Spending time with them revitalised me  (this trip fell within the six-months of frustrations I was going  through in Cairo), sparked my imagination of how I could work with them —  and learn from them as well. So it dawned on me that after being  equipped with such excellent education and my past personal history, I  ought to be the innovator and not the job-seeker.

I  am therefore going to West Africa this autumn to research for two  months and eventually start a scheme that would enhance the Child  Soldiers’ skills and raw talent into a more rewarding way of living so  that they can be accepted within their communities, where they are  currently stigmatised because they were participants in the war.  Therefore the scheme will have activities that are both  income-generating and focused on community integration, to be achieved  through the model of Social Entrepreneurship. Social Entrepreneurship is  essentially investing in people and letting them get on with it.  Investing in these people would give me the chance of using my academic  human rights scholarship in the field. It would allow me to gain an  intimate understanding who these people are, and asking them to be the  actual stake-holders so that they have a sense of ownership in the  scheme. Having spent a great deal of time in the Middle East feeling  that I had achieved nothing tangible, here was an opportunity to have a  direct impact on people’s lives.

Yes,  it might be a difficult period for graduates, but as I have discovered,  it is an exciting time as well. It has made me realise that I could be  more innovative and use the skills I have accrued over the years in a  more useful way than going down the traditional route of seeking  employment in mainstream institutions. No ‘cog in the machine’ for me…