Sazzad Hossain, the founder of the social enterprise SDI Academy, also visited to share his experience with Migrant Workers in Singapore and what he is doing to promote social inclusion.
So far, this group has trained 500 migrant workers in Singapore, and they are currently expanding the social enterprise beyond Singapore to Syrian refugees in Germany and Rohingya Refugees.
They are also currently working to develop the skills of refugees and migrant workers to enable them to sustain themselves.
“The best way to do things is coming together and working together to really understand the problem and really understand and empathise”
Their main focus is the social inclusion of migrant workers in Singapore, as they work in demanding sectors, and they don’t understand English. This results in workers not being able to understand and comprehend crucial things like safety briefings. He can relate to this, because he migrated to Singapore from Bangladesh when he was 11, and he couldn’t speak English at all. He had a difficult time, and it took him 2 years to fully understand and communicate in English.
“For me, I just lost 2 years. But for them, its a life or death situation.”
He started speaking with these workers, and he seemed to understand the root cause of most of their problems: the inability to speak English due to the fact that no one was teaching.
He decided to start teaching them English, but when more people began to join, it wasn’t as effective anymore. He took an 8-month break in order to build a syllabus. After putting so much work into this, he realised he didn’t want to teach English to just 10 or 20 people, and he wanted to impact 100 people. He booked an auditorium hall in a community centre, and 134 migrant workers attended.
He is currently working on making the idea of Social Inclusion of Migrant Workers viral by targeting the student body of Singapore.
It is incredibly important to consider the nature of the community while coming up with solutions to integrate refugees and migrant workers in certain societies.
“If we can make this mainstream and viral, we can really impact a larger community”
Students can make a difference by:
- Supporting migrant workers
- Supporting the migrant education system
- Design thinking workshops with students and migrant workers to come up with solutions
- Being involved in Social Gatherings with Migrant Workers
His students have gone on and become very successful. One such example is a Ted Talk by Saiful Islam.
“It’s one thing to talk about your own vision, but it’s another thing to see your own vision talk”
You can get involved by signing up to be a volunteer at SDI Academy’s website.
