PROJECT REPERIO
Project Reperio runs on Zoom calls and mobile data. That is not a limitation; it is the whole story.
Our beneficiaries are Rohingya refugee teens in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. Stateless, without access to public schooling, and living largely outside formal economic systems, they depend almost entirely on a working phone and an internet connection for structured learning. We work within that reality rather than around it.
In partnership with Cahaya Surya Bakti (CSB), we run weekly online sessions across two tracks: academic tuition in mathematics and English, and practical skills training in drawing, sewing, and video editing. The two-track model exists because we asked a simple question: what actually helps someone in this situation? The answer was not only academic knowledge. It was skills that could open doors, even informal ones, in a context where formal pathways are largely closed.
Every session is online. Every beneficiary is in Malaysia. Every volunteer is in Singapore. And every week, the call connects.
MY ROLE
As Head of Publicity, I handle Instagram posts, fundraising campaigns and the external story of Project Reperio. But the longer I spent telling that story, the more questions I found myself sitting with. Who decided which skills we teach, and on what basis? When a student completes our programme, what changes for them, given that they still have no certificate and no legal right to work? These are not questions with easy answers. But they are the questions I bring to every session, and they have shaped how I think about what it means to design an intervention rather than just deliver one.
OUR PARTNER
CSB is not a typical refugee support organisation. Across five schools in Johor — Kempas, Pekan Nanas, Kota Tinggi, Kluang and Muar, CSB provides pre-primary, primary and secondary education to Rohingya students and other refugee communities. For most of these students, CSB is the only structured education they will ever have access to.
What makes CSB stand out is what they have built beyond the classroom. They are the first organisation to create a clear pathway for refugee students, particularly from the Rohingya community, to pursue tertiary education in the Philippines.
For a population that the system was never designed to include, that is not a small thing. It is the difference between education as temporary relief and education as a genuine route forward.
(i) Reperio Roses: A Fundraiser & Lesson in Infrastructure Economics
Valentine's Day 2025: we sold roses around campus, raised $900 and sent every dollar to CSB. Not for books, not for school fees, not for anything that sounds impressive in a fundraising post, but for mobile data. I remember thinking it was an odd call at first. Our programme exists entirely on Zoom. A student in Johor Bahru joins us from wherever they can find a signal. If they cannot get online, they cannot join the call, and everything else we do becomes irrelevant. The data is not a nice-to-have. It is the entry point. It sounds simple when I put it that way. But it genuinely shifted how I think about what it means to support someone. I had always assumed the most important part of a programme was the content, the lesson plan, the curriculum, the skills being taught. Project Reperio made me realise that none of that matters if the person you are trying to reach cannot get through the door. Sometimes the door is a data plan. And making sure it stays open is the whole job.
(ii) Academic Lessons: Keeping Learning Alive
Our academic sessions run weekly over Zoom, covering Mathematics and English for students across different levels. A typical Math lesson covers topics such as place value, negative numbers, and number ordering. The content is not complicated, yet genuinely challenging to teach through a screen, especially for students whose access to formal education has always been patchy at best. Teaching online forced me to rethink everything I assumed about how I explained things. No whiteboard, no way to crouch next to someone who is stuck, no reading the room. Real-life examples became the whole game, negative numbers made sense once we framed them in terms of money and debt, because that was something the students already understood from their own lives. The truth is, we are not working toward anything formal. No exam, no certificate, nothing an employer would recognise. What we are trying to do is ensure that learning still feels accessible to them. Because for these students, that has never been a given, and on any day, it might not be.
What This Work Is Really About
The longer I have been involved with Project Reperio, the more one question keeps coming back to me: what happens when the volunteers graduate, the donors move on and the goodwill runs out? CSB is doing something genuinely rare. They have built a pathway for Rohingya students to access tertiary education, which is not just a service but an actual structural exit from a situation most people never escape. That took years to build and depends on relationships that could shift overnight. I have started wondering whether market-based approaches, social enterprise, skills-to-income models, and diaspora remittance networks could sit alongside charitable work to make it more durable. Not replace it. Complement it. I do not have the knowledge yet to know if that is realistic. But it is the question I am genuinely studying toward and the reason this work has stopped feeling like service and started feeling like a problem I actually want to solve.
The Impact
60
Trained Volunteers
>25
Programmes
80
Beneficiaries reached
>1,400
Instagram community