Siyad Maalim

Meet Siyad Maalim, a Student Refugee Program (SRP) alumnus contributing to the community in the Dadaab refugee camps.

He created a YouTube channel named SOMA ACADEMY with the goal of making math simple for students in the refugee camps.

“Recently after [the] COVID-19 lockdown, I started thinking about my sister and my brother in Dadaab Refugee Camps who are both in grades 12 and 11 respectively, and how they would continue their studies during these challenging times. Although I knew they may have difficulty with Internet bandwidth, I was convinced that if I created math tutorials on YouTube and shared the link, it would help some of the refugee students in the camps.”

SOMA ACADEMY already has over 30 great videos arranged by math topics playlists such as algebra, precalculus and statistics.

‘’I started this creation of Math videos well over 3 months ago, and so far I have been getting great feedback from students in the camps,“ Siyad tells us.

The videos have accumulated over 2000 views and a few encouraging comments in just three months: “’Great work, Siyad. Keep going“ or ‘’Good job brother. Keep up the good work“ are some of those comments you could read under his videos.

Siyad came to Canada in 2008 through WUSC’s Student Refugee Program. He graduated from the University of British Columbia in 2013 with a Bachelor of Science, Major in Statistics.

He dreams of a future where organizations from different sectors, including tech giants, will collaborate to improve young refugees education opportunities through better access to the Internet and other information and communication technologies.

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