The first plane carrying Afghan refugees from Pakistan has arrived in the UK.
The airplane departed from Pakistan with 132 individuals onboard, according to officials in the country who spoke to the BBC.
Many people escaped from the Taliban in Afghanistan because they had worked with or for the UK government. These people are now in Pakistan and waiting to be moved to a new place.
Some of them used to translate for the British Army and teach for the British Council.
The UK government has arranged and hired 12 flights to bring people from Afghanistan to the UK by the end of December, as confirmed by the Civil Aviation Authority.
All the refugees are either in the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme or Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy.
They were told to go to Pakistan to get their visas, but charities say some people have been waiting there for over a year, and that many of their visas have now become invalid.
Earlier this month, Pakistan announced that it intended to begin sending back people who are in the country illegally starting from 1 November.
After the Taliban took over Afghanistan again in 2021, they said they would forgive and not punish people who helped the international forces. However, many Afghans still feel scared that they will get in trouble for what they did.
Some people told the BBC that they are worried they have put themselves in more danger by following the UK’s instructions to leave Afghanistan.
Qasim, a person using a fake name, was one of the people who helped the UK authorities.
Before we left Afghanistan, our lives were in danger half of the time. “He said that they are in complete danger now. ”
Pakistan has told 1. 7 million people from Afghanistan to leave the country.
The UK is requesting assistance to relocate more Afghan people who had been employed by them.
A document shared in court shows that the British authorities in Pakistan believe that people who are waiting for UK visas in Pakistan are likely to be sent back to their home country.
According to information from the government, about 3,250 people, including men, women, and children, are currently staying in guest houses and hotels in the capital city of Pakistan, Islamabad.
While they are there, they cannot work legally and their kids cannot go to school.
A lot of people thought that when they first went to Pakistan, they would only have to wait there for a few weeks.
Court documents revealed that many people had to wait longer to come to the UK and stay in hotels because Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stated that only in very rare situations could they be allowed to do so.
Instead, they had to find a place to stay for a longer period of time before they could move to a new location. An email said that this plan should save the taxpayer money overall.
The government has decided that people on relocation programmes will not have to find suitable housing before they move. The BBC has this information.
Tag: British Council
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First Afghan flight from Pakistan lands in United Kingdom
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British Council honors top performing Ghanaian students
The British Council has honored top performing Ghanaian students at the Bright Future Awards event in Accra, Ghana.
Twenty-seven top-performing students from Ghanaian schools have received a total of fourty seven awards from the British Council in honour of their exceptional performance in the Cambridge International exams.
The ceremony took place at the Accra International Conference Centre on Saturday (24 June) and was attended by the students, their families, school leaders, and teachers from the 82 British Council Partner Schools in the country.
Top achievers who received the Star Performer Awards are:
- Joel Owuraku Nkrumah – from Angela Specialist School International with a record of 10 A-stars in IGSCE
- Elisabeth Yetimget Demissie – from African Science Academy with a record three A-stars at the A-Level exams
Some of the other winners were:
- Jash Prakash Shah, East Airport International School, IGCSE Accounting
- Naana Ekua Adokua Annan- Galaxy International School, IGCSE Information and Communication Technology
- Chrisma Thania Ewurabena Egyirwaa Fabin, Ghana Christian International High School, GCE O Level English
- Gabrielle Nartey, Delhi Private School International , IGSCE Literature in English
Two schools received The Best Performing Schools award:
- Angels Specialist School International – Overall IGSCE School
- African Science Academy- Overall A Level School
School director, of Angels Specialist School, Joel Duncan Idun, was delighted to be recognised and noted that “We are exceptionally proud of the achievements of these dedicated students. Their awards are a testimony to the hard work put in by them and our teachers.”
Country director for the British Council Ghana, Nii Doodo Dodoo said: “The British Council Partner Schools community is a network of over 2000 educators across the world, including leaders of forward-thinking schools with an international outlook, and teachers committed to a modern, student-centred approach to teaching. Ours is a community that extends beyond the classroom to support parents and carers who want to improve the life chances of their children.”
“British Council Ghana has partnered with 82 schools, 120 school leaders and 2500 teachers to bring the Cambridge qualification to young Ghanaians and I am proud of the accomplishments of the 33 award winners today.”
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Governments urged to scale up and maintain innovations by young graduates
The Regional Director in charge of Higher Education Programmes at the British Council in Sub-Sahara Africa, Adetomi Soyinka has said that it is important to engage the government on ways to ensure that innovations by young graduates are scaled up and sustained.
According to her the scale of need versus resourcing continues to remain imbalanced hence, the need to engage the government on how to roll out partnerships that will imbibe the knowledge acquired by a small cohort into the entire education system.
She said Innovation for African Universities (IAU) has begun engagement with the government and would continue to provide data on how possible it would be to achieve such a target.
“We have already started government engagements at the beginning of the project. This was to get them informed on what we would like to do and achieve. Now that we are done, we would take the data, insights, and learnings back to the government, to say it works and therefore this is how partnerships should be done. For the things that did not work also, we share with the government so that they become aware of that without going through the same or similar process,” she said.
Ms. Soyinka added that government must be ready to embed the information provided into the education systems and scale it. This she said would be the way impact and long-term change can happen if the government does that.
She made these comments among others at the British Council’s Innovations for African Universities (IAU) conference that seeks to promote entrepreneurship skills among university students and close the gap between job seekers and job creators for African youth, in Accra.
IAU was created by the British Council in 2021 on the back of the COVID-19 crisis, which represented a critical time for curriculum review and teaching innovation amongst tertiary institutions in the region. Many universities agreed that there was a need to think outside the box to evolve teaching practices that equip students to become self-starters.
By pairing universities in Africa and the UK, IAU sought to catalyze the development of entrepreneurship curriculums customized to each country’s unique situation and economic needs in a bid to leapfrog the creation of generational businesses across the continent in response to its rapidly growing youth population, where many are confronted by high levels of unemployment and underemployment.
The conference focused on several broad issues, challenges, and opportunities facing the Higher Education sector in the area of employment and entrepreneurship and seeks to bring a range of critical ecosystem players into the same room to develop new ideas for new solutions to address youth unemployment challenges.
On his part, the Executive Chairman, Sakfos Holdings, Accra Ghana, Dr. Abu Sakara also indicated that it is important to take a critical look at the policy environment and what could be done to ensure that successful innovations flourish.
“We must know what is it about the policy environment that is stopping people from scaling up successful programmes. Once we identify those areas, and we know where the problems are, we must be willing to respect and restructure the economy to allow them to flourish,” he said.
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Great Scholarships 2023 has commenced – British Council
The launch of the GREAT Scholarships 2023 has been announced as part of the Study UK campaign, which is being carried out by the British Council in collaboration with the Great Britain campaign of the UK government.
Beginning in the fall of 2023, the GREAT Scholarships give Ghanaian students the chance to pursue postgraduate taught studies in the UK.
Thirteen universities are offering thirteen scholarships as part of the programme in collaboration with the British Council and the GREAT Britain campaign of the UK government. These institutions are
- Keele University
- Bangor University
- Ulster University
- University of Bolton
- University of East Anglia
- University of St Andrews
- University of Derby
- University of Essex
- University of Sussex
- University of Westminster
- University of York
- University of Kent
- University of Hull
The GREAT Scholarships aim to widen access to UK education in Ghana and celebrates the diverse range of institutions in the UK that offer a vast number of courses for students to choose from. With over 2,000 of Ghanaian students choosing to study in the UK each year, the GREAT Scholarships aim to build on the strong links between the UK and Ghana and continue to welcome all Ghanaian students to the UK.
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Be more innovative to expand operations – British Council to Entrepreneurs
Director of Programmes and Partnerships at the British Council, Solomon Domayen Antumwini, has urged entrepreneurs to be more innovative in their quest to expand their businesses.
According to him, his outfit would devise various strategies to support entrepreneurs with skills to bridge the unemployment gap in the country.
Speaking to Joy Business at the Innovation for African Universities Programme at the Accra Technical University, he said innovative entrepreneurs could promote growth, facilitate the competitiveness of an organisation and help generate profit.
According to him, implementing innovative ideas could help a business become successful.
“We are doing this project to support these young ones to understand the importance of being innovative as an entrepreneur. This is key to their growth and expansion,” he said.
The project is designed to support the development of Africa – UK University Partnerships that build institutional capacity for engagement in entrepreneurship and innovative ecosystems in selected African countries.
The overarching programme objective is to strengthen the capacity of universities and increase their capabilities to participate and provide meaningful contributions as key players within the entrepreneurship ecosystem.
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Entrepreneur urges government to protect agric investors
Issa Ouedraogo, a social entrepreneur active in Ghana’s agricultural sector, has pleaded with the government to step in and protect investors in the industry from people and groups who plot to defraud them.
He asserts that several players in the agricultural sector, in particular banks, attorneys, and Ministry of Agriculture employees, have a predilection for underpaying investors, particularly Ghanaians living abroad.
Speaking on Friday at a social enterprise seminar held by the British Council, Mr. Ouedraogo partially ascribed the agricultural sector’s stalled growth to this situation.
Mr Ouedraogo, who is the founder of B-BOVID, an agribusiness based on social entrepreneurship principles, recounted how some local banks and lawyers connived with another French firm to dupe him of his investment.
He also explained how personnel of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, in 2017, eliminated an initiative he had developed from a Ghana Commercial Agriculture Project (GCAP) without any reasonable reason.
The programme, he said, was funded by a grant of US$2.85 million from the Japan Social Development Fund (JSDF) secured through a trust fund arrangement with the World Bank.
His initiative, dubbed Ghana Peri-urban Vegetables Value Chain Project (GPVVCP), was aimed at promoting peri-urban farming in the country.
He further complained about how some stakeholders in the agricultural sector caused the publication of some false news about him and his organization, in an attempt to court disaffection for him.
Mr Ouedraogo explained that he is not the only person in the agricultural industry who has suffered from such orchestrated attempts geared at frustrating investors.
He is, therefore, calling on the government to institute a probe into the many concerns of investors in the sector and address the challenges.
He underscored that until a proper investigation is conducted into the activities of some persons in the country and their nefarious activities brought to book, they would continue to push investors out of Ghana to the detriment of the larger population.
“It would further move mountains to exacerbate the worsening growing phenomenon of unemployment in the country, constantly ringing profusely into the ears of entrepreneurs, political leaders, and government officials,” he said.