For displaced young people, education can fail at an oddly bureaucratic final hurdle.
Someone may have spent years learning through refugee schools, NGOs, different countries or self-study, and be genuinely ready for university. But if none of that adds up to a single, recognisable certificate, universities and employers are left trying to interpret an educational history that simply doesn't fit their forms. The obstacle, in other words, may have less to do with ability than with paperwork.
The question the students asked
At the Alsama Project, which runs education centres for refugee and displaced teenagers in Beirut's Shatila camp, that gap was identified not by a policy paper or a donor report, but by the students themselves. In 2023, after years of working to become university-ready, Alsama's students asked the organisation a simple, difficult question: how were they supposed to prove what they could do?
There was no existing qualification that answered the problem well, so Alsama began developing one around the students whose interrupted education it needed to represent.
An exam built around capability, not geography
The result became known as the G12++. Rather than requiring students to have followed one country's curriculum without interruption, the qualification was designed around what displacement actually does to an education: it interrupts it, scatters it, and moves it across borders and school systems. So the G12++ assesses critical thinking, communication, problem-solving and academic potential instead, in a form intended to make sense regardless of where or how someone learned.
It costs around US$20 to sit, a price built specifically so it could be covered by NGOs working in refugee camps and other underserved places, wherever a computer and an internet connection can be found.
It was field-tested across six countries with 183 students. The results showed Alsama students achieving the same average scores as formally educated students at international schools, while post-beta psychometric analysis supported the exam's quality.
THE SCALE OF THE WORK
From a students' question to a global qualification
Source: Alsama Project and Fund for Innovation in Development. See sources below.
What has already happened
By 2026, the G12++ had moved beyond a hopeful proposal. The first live examination took place in Shatila in February 2026. The qualification has since been independently benchmarked by Ecctis at UK RQF Level 2 up to Level 3 for benchmarkable subjects. In May, Cambridge University Press & Assessment announced a formal partnership with Alsama to help strengthen and scale the qualification internationally, signed at the Education World Forum in London. Cambridge has said the qualification was originally inspired by Alsama's own students.
The first certified graduates are expected to move into university, vocational training and employment from September 2026.
Alsama's longer-term ambition is striking: by 2040, they want 50,000 displaced young people a year to be able to earn the G12++.
For context, around nine in every hundred refugees worldwide currently make it into higher education, against roughly forty-two in every hundred among the general global population. That gap is not, for the most part, a gap in ability. It is a gap in recognition.
Why this story matters
For years, the instinct in refugee education has largely been to help displaced children fit back into the system that existed before their lives were interrupted: catch them up, slot them in, hope the gap closes.
Alsama's students asked a different question: rather than asking how to get back into a system built for uninterrupted lives, they asked why that should have to be the only system available to them.
That is a different kind of hope from the kind that arrives as charity. It asks whether an obstacle long treated as inevitable needed to exist in the first place. In this case, the answer was that it did not.
A thought for today
We tend to assume that systems are fixed and that people have to bend themselves to fit them. The G12++ suggests something less obvious: sometimes a system only looks inevitable because it was built around lives that followed a very different course.
Students who had lived through interrupted schooling were able to see what the existing system failed to recognise, and people willing to listen helped turn that insight into something practical. The story is a useful reminder that those closest to a problem may also be unusually well placed to show where a better answer could begin.
Sources and further reading
- Alsama Project, G12++ The student-led origin of the qualification, Ecctis benchmarking, first graduates and long-term scale ambition.
- Fund for Innovation in Development, Supporting displaced youth in Lebanon The qualification's curriculum-agnostic design, assessment model, digital delivery and US$20 target cost.
- Alsama Project, The G12++ launches The February 2026 launch and international field-testing of the qualification.
- Cambridge University Press & Assessment, 20 May 2026 The formal Cambridge–Alsama partnership and plans to develop and scale G12++ internationally.
- UNHCR, Higher education and skills Figures comparing refugee access to higher education with global higher-education enrolment.
Image credit
Hero image: Syrian refugee students attending school in Lebanon. Photo: Adam Patterson/Panos/DFID, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.