Article 26 Backpack

News and Updates on Article 26 Backpack

 

A Backpack to Help Refugees

This month’s guest on Face to Face With Chancellor May is a student who came to UC Davis to help refugees preserve their access to higher education — all while completing her own studies.

Dheera Dusanapudi is a junior studying international relations and religious studies, and works as the student lead for the Article 26 Backpack, a program that offers refugees face-to-face counseling and a cloud storage platform to preserve important records like transcripts and diplomas.

Chronicle of Higher Education Features Article 26 Backpack and Keith David Watenpaugh

Concerned by recent reports of official documents being destroyed at security checkpoints due to the shift of power in Afghanistan, UC Davis professor Keith David Watenpaugh found it critical to help students preserve their academic achievements under the Taliban. So this summer, Watenpaugh and a team of interns at the university quickly implemented a Dari/Farsi version of the Article 26 Backpack tool to remedy this issue.

UC Davis' Article 26 Backpack Digital Human Rights Tool Expands to Rwanda

With the support of the Mastercard Foundation, UC Davis, in collaboration with the Rwandan-based educational NGO, Kepler, has embarked on a project to learn how the UC Davis Article 26 Backpack can help empower refugees to overcome those barriers in Rwanda and elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa. Developed in 2018, Article 26 Backpack is a joint project of UC Human Rights Studies and UC Davis Global Affairs. The multi-lingual tool keeps critical academic and other documents safe, fosters educational and employment mobility, and builds solidarity across different refugee communities through its secure sharing capabilities.

Afghans urged to protect records and credentials

University of California, Davis in the US is encouraging Afghans to use its cloud-based Article 26 Backpack to safely store records and credentials. “Backpack is a way to safely curate, store and share all elements of an individual’s academic and career progress and preparation,” said Keith David Watenpaugh, professor and director, UC Davis Human Rights Studies, Article 26 Backpack.