The President of Yarmouk University, Prof. Zeidan Kafafi, sponsored the closing ceremony of the “RIADI” project, which is implemented by the University under the framework of the scholarship of the HOPES program funded by the European Regional Trust Fund for Responding to the Syrian Crisis “Madad Fund”, which is executed by the German Scientific Exchange DAAD in partnership with the British Cultural Center, Campus France, and the Dutch Commission for International Cooperation in Nuffic Higher Education. In a speech delivered during the ceremony, Kafafi stressed the university's interest to provide a sound educational environment for its students, offer various academic programs that meet their aspirations, and include distinguished competencies in their teaching and administrative staff, thus preparing students and qualifying them with the leading skills necessary to enable them economically and socially. He then pointed out that Yarmouk University has always been able to achieve balance between its academic programs dealing with various humanities, scientific, and medical topics; simultaneously, it has always sought to develop new academic programs that keep pace with the changes in the world in various scientific fields.
He then explained that Yarmouk, as a national institution that has a social responsibility towards the local community, was the pioneer in the establishment of the Refugees, Displaced Persons and Forced Migration Studies Center in 1992. He explained that since the beginning of the Syrian crisis, the University has implemented nearly twenty international projects to serve Syrian refugees in the northern region of Jordan attempting to qualify and prepare refugees to be productive individuals in the host communities.
In his turn, the project director, the Director of International Relations and Projects at the university; Dr. Mowaffaq Al-Atoum, explained that the number of Syrian refugees officially registered in Jordan in 2018 reached 657,628, and that a large number of them were concentrated in the northern region, especially in Irbid governorate, which caused a great pressure on the Jordanian society, especially at the educational sector and the labor market. Thus, the idea of the project focused on entrepreneurship and providing young people with the appropriate skills to build their future aspirations. He also mentioned that through the project, a business incubator was established on the campus, thus providing an opportunity for Jordanian youth and Syrian refugees to design and develop their entrepreneurial ideas.
Dr. Nasser Al Hindawi from HOPES thanked Jordan for its cooperation in the success of this project, praising the efforts of the project team who supported the students and motivated them to keep developing their entrepreneurial ideas through creating short-term projects that can enable them to build their future. He pointed out that the HOPES program received 128 requests for projects support and that just eight projects were selected. Among those eight, as he mentioned, four projects are from Yarmouk University, something that indicates the outstanding level of projects submitted by the university and the outstanding supervision devoted by the faculty members of the university to their students.
During the closing ceremony, the incubator's director, Dr. Yazan Al-Essa, briefly introduced the ideas adopted by the incubator and the stages of translating them into projects on the ground. However, the ceremony was attended by the Director of the DAAD Office in Jordan, Gabriela von Verkes, a number of deans, faculty members, university officials, students involved in the project, and some students' families.
