Do you know where your high school diploma is? How about your university transcript? 

In times of war and conflict, education-related and professional documents get left behind, lost or destroyed making if difficult if not impossible for refugees and other vulnerable people to enroll in higher education or find work.

Seven years ago, Article 26 Backpack, Backpack for short, was launched from UC Davis, with support from the Ford Foundation, as means to safely store and share these documents with universities, scholarship agencies and even employers. Backpack’s community today exceeds 5,000 members and Backpack is available in nine languages, including Arabic, Spanish, Persian and Ukrainian. Among its leading partners is Kepler, an educational organization founded in Rwanda following the 1994 genocide. 

Backpack is driven by a global community of young people across East Africa, the Middle East and California who have been trained by UC Davis to support their global peers in securing their future. Many of these Backpackguides are refugee university students themselves. UC Davis undergraduates in the Interdepartmental Human Rights Studies Program have led this community, known as the Backpack Guide Collective, since 2020. 

Article 26 Backpack is led by Keith David Watenpaugh, professor and director of Human Rights Studies and housed in UC Davis Global Affairs.

Read the full article on the UC Davis Letters and Science Magazine website