Sharjah Refugee Advocacy Award Ceremony On June 20

Sharjah Ruler Sheikh Sultan will conduct the 5^th annual edition of the Sharjah International Award for Refugee Advocacy and Support (SIARA 2021) online. He will virtually address the award ceremony on June 20^th, which is World Refugee Day. 

More About The Award Ceremony

His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, Supreme Council Member and Ruler of Sharjah will declare the winner of the award and Dh 500,000 after his address. The award recognizes charitable efforts in Asia, Middle East, and Africa. This year’s round of the award ceremony witnesses 213 nominations from 41 nations.

The program is being arranged by an international humanitarian philanthropic organization based in Sharjah, called The Big Heart Foundation (TBHF). They largely contribute their efforts towards aiding refugees and other needy people across the globe. They work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Filippo Grandi, who also has plans to address the online spectators of the event.

The SIARA ceremony has been conducted since 2017. It aims to honor people and groups who have undertaken endeavors to lessen the hardships faced by refugees, domestically displaced people, and asylum seekers in host countries, which includes the Asian and MENA area. 

The award ceremony also recognizes remarkable public-spirited initiatives that deal with people impacted by natural disasters, poverty, and armed violence on a global scale. In its previous four editions, SIARA celebrated individuals and organizations who committed to helping displaced people and did exemplary work in that area. 

Previous Recipients of The Award

In the last four editions of SIARA, starting from 2017, four different organizations were awarded. Tumaini Letu, a non-profit organization based at the Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi, Africa, and founded by refugee poet and artist Trésor Nzengu Mpaun was the recipient of the honor in 2020.

Tumaini Festival is the organization’s flagship program. It is a cultural and artistic fair that over 99,000 people visited. 304 teams of artists from 18 nations joined together for the event, producing almost $150,000 annually. 

The year before that, SIARA awarded Lebanon’s Amel Association International, a growing NGO with ground-breaking initiatives. Their areas of interest included sectors such as health, protection, education, livelihood, empowerment, and psycho-social support. 

In the past seven years, they provided training in these areas for thousands of individuals, which includes refugees from Syria and Iraq. They have done over 1.6 million interventions in these sectors, along with other philanthropic efforts and support schemes.

In 2018, the award went to Dignity for Children Foundation in Malaysia, for the dedication they showcased towards thousands of families in Sentul, Malaysia. They were able to foster a peaceful atmosphere for these families, especially for the sake of the children’s education. 

In the very first SIARA event in 2017, Sustainable Development Foundation, Yemen received the award. It was their steps towards saving the lives of people living in one of the Middle East’s riskiest conflict zones that earned them the honor. They were able to maintain the people’s dignity by providing them with essentials such as food, water, shelter, and education, especially in the most impacted areas.