From Survival to Systems

Some opportunities are not simply invitations to speak. They are invitations to bring lived experience, community knowledge, and questions from the field into a wider conversation.

Bate Neville Agbor, Founder and Executive Director of NEVOR Circle Foundation, has been accepted as a presenter at the RME 2026 International Conference: "Voices in Action: Transformative Collaboration and Educational Solidarity with Refugees & Migrants."

He will present "From Survival to Systems: A Refugee Leader's Framework for Community-Driven Education, Research, and Innovation."

His journey to this point did not begin in an academic institution. It began with survival. After arriving in Nigeria in 2019 and entering a refugee settlement, he began rebuilding his life through learning, volunteering, ICT training, community engagement, and documentation.

Over time, he observed that refugees were learning, developing skills, starting businesses, organizing communities, teaching, farming, building, and leading. But individual capacity does not automatically become collective capacity. Knowledge can disappear. Commitments can be forgotten. Leadership transitions can create instability. Lessons from one project can be lost before the next begins.

That observation shaped a guiding question: what enables a refugee community to keep learning, organizing, and building when displacement becomes prolonged?

The work from the Digital Systems Technology Hub to community leadership, documentation, and the development of the Community Coordination and Accountability System (CCAS) through NCF has been an attempt to explore that question in practice.

At RME 2026, Bate will share lessons from refugee-led education, institutional memory, community ownership, leadership continuity, research, and locally driven systems-building.

The question NCF brings into the room is not only how we educate refugees, but how we learn from them. Not only how we include refugees in existing systems, but how we build systems with them.

Refugees are not waiting to become capable. They are already learning, organizing, leading, experimenting, and building. What is needed is not simply inclusion. What is needed is partnership.

NCF looks forward to bringing the experience and lessons from Adagom Refugee Settlement, Nigeria, into this international conversation.