WUSC’s Response to COVID-19

WUSC places the health and safety of its personnel, and of the communities with which it works, as its first priority. WUSC is monitoring the global outbreak of COVID-19 and is closely following advice from public health officials globally, nationally, and locally.

WUSC is currently taking the following precautions in response to the health and travel concerns related to COVID-19:

• Due to current and anticipated operational and international travel limitations, we repatriated Canadian volunteers stationed overseas in March 2020.
• We have postponed any new in-person volunteer training and international departures of Canadian volunteers.
• We have postponed the selection process for the 2021 – 2022 cohort of the Student Refugee Program in Malawi, Uganda, Kenya, Jordan and Lebanon. Shortlisted applicants in these countries will be notified as soon as the selection process is able to resume.
• We will not be able to facilitate the arrival of Student Refugee Program students in August 2020. Over the coming months, we will continue to work closely with our stakeholders in Canada and overseas with the hope that it will be safe and feasible to facilitate arrivals in December 2020 to January 2021.
• We have temporarily closed our offices globally and have asked our staff to work from home to encourage social distancing and promote good community practice.
• We closed our office in Burkina Faso, and are undertook a thorough cleaning, due to an office visitor being in contact with individuals who have been confirmed to have COVID-19.

We will continue to monitor the situation and will update this post with new information as it emerges.

For questions about WUSC’s response to COVID-19, please email [email protected].

This post was last updated on June 19, 2020.