Aid Proposed For Refugee Students

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30480, 30 June 1964, Page 14

Aid Proposed For Refugee Students

All ' national unions of students should be asked to provide funds, scholarships and material assistance to enable refugees to ' continue their studies abroad, a commission on programme activities recommended to the International Student Conference last evening. It recommended that all available information should be collected on refugee students so they could be helped with their studies. Areas of particular emphasis in the next two years should be countries in Southern Africa, including South Africa, Angola and Mozambique. Other areas which required special attention were Palestine and the countries in Latin America which were suffering under dictatorships. “The primary criterion for providing assistance to refugee students should be their indivdiual needs,” said the commission’s report. “The exchange fund and the secretariat should entertain applications for assistance through all possible sources, including student organisations, political groups and individuals themselves, with a view to providing assistance and support to those students who need it most.” It also recommended that the conference authorise its secretariat to continue and expand its assistance to students from developing countries, particularly in the area of scholarships to students from such countries as Southern Rhodesia and Northern Rhodesia. Student work camps were

one of the most effective ways of uniting students in a common achievement, said the report, and they should be organised where specially pressing needs existed and where such an undertaking would be t a symbol of solidarity and would serve to help the country concerned in the solution of one of its most challenging problems. “Possible projects would include construction of schools, student hostels, roads and irrigation works,” said the report. “The secretariat should provide all possible help to national unions of students which are prepared to undertake such projects and which also have sufficient local support for their implementation.”

The report suggested specific projects in the West Indies and Costa Rica. The conference has yet to approve the commission's proposals.