Yemen is facing the world’s most urgent humanitarian crisis and higher education emergency. With widespread violence, disease, hunger, and instability, education and scientific research in the country have become practically unattainable. University buildings have been destroyed, scientific centers have ceased operations, and research has halted.
Yemeni professors across the country must brave bombing campaigns, violent clashes, and checkpoints to report to campus. They may risk dismissal, imprisonment, or violence for speaking out against corrupt practices on university campuses, and many face persecution simply based on their identities or family names. Most faculty members have not been paid their salaries in several years.
James Robin King, IIE-SRF Director “To many people, Yemen is merely a conflict zone. In reality, the country is home to a diverse and rich set of indigenous artistic and scholarly traditions, as well as a large higher education system.”
IIE-SRF’S Response to the Higher Education Emergency in Yemen
Requests for support from Yemeni scholars to IIE-SRF have soared since the conflict began in 2014. Yemen remained the third most common country of origin for IIE-SRF fellows selected in 2023.
IIE-SRF has responded to this conflict by awarding 165 fellowships to 95 Yemeni scholars, partnering with 43 host institutions in 14 countries. In addition to identifying academic safe havens in Europe, North America, Tunisia, and Malaysia, IIE-SRF has placed Yemeni scholars at higher education institutions in Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq’s Kurdistan region, enabling them to stay within their home region, use their native language, and maintain ties with their students and colleagues in Yemen.
Together with our committed hosts and funding partners, we are preserving Yemen’s national academy and the country’s future.
Meet Our Scholars
By providing a lifeline to Yemeni scholars, we are ensuring that Yemen will have the experts and leaders to rebuild the country and its education sector when the conflict ends.
IIE-SRF Alumnus, Philadelphia University“I could never think of my work in Yemen, where one is obsessed with the search for food, water, electricity, and other essentials. Now I live in an atmosphere free from threats and am finally able to resume my academic work on post-colonial literature.”
Read about some of our Yemeni fellows featured in past issues of our Beacon newsletter.
Fathiah Zakham
Dr. Fathiah Zakham was a microbiologist researching drug-resistant tuberculosis at Hodeidah University in Yemen when the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences building was bombed in May 2015. She told Nature magazine that she has vivid memories of those air strikes that targeted the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah and still suffers flashbacks from that terrifying time. “We were hearing the voices of explosions, of air strikes, of attacks,” she recalls. A bomb destroyed the building where Zakham’s lab was located, killing four security guards. “It was a very new building, and it became a mass of rubble,” she says. Facing threats to her life and unable to pursue her research, Zakham was forced to leave the country. A partnership between the Finnish National Agency for Education (EDUFI) and the IIE Scholar Rescue Fund brought her to the University of Helsinki, where she conducted groundbreaking research on viral fevers and advocating on behalf of Yemeni women scientists. Zakham was awarded the 2020 OWSD-Elsevier Foundation Award for Early-Career Women Scientists in the Developing World for her research on the diagnosis of infectious diseases.
Dr. Hasan Maridi
Dr. Hasan Maridi, a theoretical nuclear physicist, undertook fellowship appointments at Jordan’s Philadelphia University, where he taught courses, published research on the energy dependence and surface contribution of the nucleon-nucleus optical potential, participated in local and international conferences, and organized multiple workshops and field trips for his students. “After years of living in difficult and insecure circumstances, IIE-SRF enabled me to live safely and resume my research and connection to the scientific community,” he says. Following the conclusion of his fellowship in 2020, Maridi accepted a position as researcher at the University of Warsaw in Poland.
Dr. Mustafa Bahran
Dr. Mustafa Bahran is an internationally renowned physicist and former Minister of Energy in Yemen. He lost his home and his job when he refused to use his skills toward violence for the rebel government in Sana’a. “I am a man of peace and intellect, not war,” he says. “I would not get my hands dirty with my own countrymen’s blood.” In Yemen, Bahran worked with the International Atomic Energy Agency, widely known as the world’s “Atoms for Peace and Development” organization, to promote the safe, secure, and peaceful use of nuclear technologies. He developed Yemen’s National Atomic Energy Commission, where, he told Physics Today, they trained “everybody that worked in anything to do with radioactivity” and introduced many peaceful applications of nuclear energy for medical and agricultural applications. During the massive air strikes campaign in 2015, he says “the house my family and I lived in was destroyed by shock waves. The doors and windows flew. The interior décor, the furniture, everything, flew. Nothing was left except the rocks and concrete.” After his home was destroyed, Bahran received a warning that they “had to get out.” With IIE-SRF support, he taught for a year and a half at the University of Oklahoma before joining Canada’s Carleton University as a visiting professor in the Department of Physics. There, he started a new line of research in physics education supported by a Carleton University grant. For the past five years, he has been very active in calling for peace in Yemen, has co-founded the Association of Yemeni Academics and Professionals (AYAP), and continues to be an advocate for threatened and displaced scholars worldwide.
Dr. Mohammed Almahfali
Dr. Mohammed Almahfali, a specialist in Arabic language and literature, undertook IIE-SRF fellowship appointments from 2017 to 2019 at Lund University Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) in Sweden. With research interests that range from Yemeni media to modern Arabic poetry, much of Almahfali’s recent work has focused on promoting awareness and understanding of Yemen’s minority groups, which have faced discrimination, targeting, and marginalization in the country. Of his IIE-SRF appointment at CMES, Almahfali said, “The fellowship felt like not just a two-year period, but a decade of experience. I have gained a great international network, improved my language skills, and developed my research tools.” He later served as Executive Director of the INSAF Center for Defending Freedoms & Minorities, a non-profit organization that seeks to elucidate the social, political, and economic realities faced by Yemen’s minorities. Ultimately, Almahfali says, the organization aims to help advance legal protections for these communities that will “safeguard their rights to think and believe.” In 2023, Almahfali joined Sweden’s Malmö University as a research assistant.
