Galina Delicia Ishimwe is a young Burundian refugee living in Rwanda. Her family could not afford university fees, but her father learned in a WhatsApp group of Burundian refugees about the DAFI scholarship, supported by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.
A strong student in high school, Galina applied and was accepted. She now studies civil engineering at the University of Rwanda. “It was really an answered prayer,” she says. Through a university partnership with the World Bank, she was chosen as one of five top students for an infrastructure programme and completed an internship there.
She hopes to do a master’s degree abroad and work in planning cities and transport systems. According to UNHCR, 11 per cent of refugee students worldwide now have access to higher education, a record high and ten times more than in 2019.
