My name is Espoir, and I have been an advocate and influencer with Baobab Women’s Project for several years. As someone who has lived experience of the asylum process and who understands how it often fails people fleeing persecution and violence, I felt like I could speak for and with other women who have gone through the same ordeal. I know what it is like to suffer from destitution and lose hope – so when I first became a volunteer with Baobab after a drop-in session in 2018, I wanted to use my voice to offer support, encouragement and advice to asylum-seeking and refugee women who were in despair because they felt trapped by the immigration system.
As I went from being a volunteer to an advocate to now director at Baobab, over the last six years, I have worked with our partner organisations to galvanise other women into talking about their experiences and lobbying for change in the UK’s harsh asylum laws. I believe that we are all much stronger when we work in solidarity.
I attend many group events and workshops in my role at Baobab, and always think that these are valuable opportunities to meet and share ideas with other advocates. Recently, I had a very positive experience that I would like to share. I represented Baobab as an influencer at a conference in London organised by Refugees in Effective and Active Partnership (REAP), an independent, refugee-led organisation in West London. REAP aims to influence policy decisions and practices, and empower refugees and Asylum seekers so they can live equally as valuable and valued members of British society.
This conference aimed:
- to raise continuous awareness against the hostile immigration environment that asylum seekers are forced to be a part of.
- to encourage more organisations to join in the fight for systemic change, with a focus on the End Detention Campaign, whose goal is to ensure that asylum seekers are free to work.
During the conference I felt fulfilled because the turnout was great. Many different organisations across the country attended, and all their representatives agreed that radical policy change is needed to improve the welfare of asylum seekers and other migrants. We were divided into break-out rooms for workshops, and participants were happy to share their stories confidently – sometimes these stories were about their own experiences, and other times they spoke about the people they advocated for. We were all ready to support REAP in whatever strategy they want to engage in to ensure that the hostile environment policy is stopped.
I also want to share some of the sobering insights from migrants and asylum seekers whom I had one-on-one conversations with:
“I have been in the hotel for 4 months and the food is just not healthy, we eat the same food every day, we have complained to no avail and I am not getting any younger, help us fight this hostile environment”.
“Why should my children not have the same opportunity as their classmates, they are not allowed to benefit from some scholarship programmes or obtain higher education just because their parents are asylum seekers”.
“We have the right to work but no employer is accepting us to work because we do not have a permanent address and work experience”
“We are asylum seekers, we are human beings so we should be treated as such”.
I found this conference very important because every chance for migrants and people seeking asylum to speak up for themselves is always critical.
I met and networked with some community groups who have common goals with Baobab, such as HOST NATION (which connects refugees with host communities), CTRC CARE, HEAR (Humanity, Equality, Rights) among others.
Attending such conferences is always heartening because they show me time and again that organisations can find ways to partner up and develop ways to make the UK more safe and welcoming to migrants, whether they are forcibly displaced or not.
I look forward to my next conference, to fostering more solidarity with my fellow advocates from around the country, and to discussing the best ways to push for policy change.
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