The World University Service’s motto is: "If you have a good idea, apply it." For us this means to realise ideas within the field of education, to offer platforms for educational policy and to help develop educational projects and programmes conducted by university students and academic staff in Germany as well as international educational projects.
The reason for this is that cooperating internationally in the field of education is also a matter of solidarity (ZEP 2011, 34/2). Simply put, it has been and still is the goal of active WUS members to advocate the "human right to education", just as it was adopted in the Lima Declaration by WUS promotion. The human right to education also includes humanitarian care and post-war reconstruction aid, disaster relief after earthquakes, tsunamis or flooding and educational development projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
In 1920, the association was established in Vienna as the ‘European Student Relief Fund’ and considered itself to be an organisation of academic staff to support people who work, teach and learn in an academic environment. Since then 50 WUS committees have been founded across the globe. The German committee was founded in 1950. After years of isolation during the Nazi era, WUS enabled German university students at that time to establish international contacts and to again be a part of the international academic community and to be accepted. Already in the 1950s, WUS put its focus on improving the rights and the educational situation of university students from Africa, Asia and Latin America at German universities.
WUS develops recommendations to improve the guidance and support of foreign university students and irregularly publishes the results of projects and studies in the German WUS magazine AUSZEIT (Time out). Furthermore, WUS supports the self-organisation of foreign university students in networks, such as Germany-wide organisations of students from Ethiopia, Chile, China, Eritrea, Ghana, Greece, Indonesia, Cameroon, Morocco, Palestine, Peru, Turkey and Vietnam. WUS particularly supports university students and researchers in founding organisations, who were forced to flee to Germany as expatriates. Due to these networks, former "refugees" can become development aid workers in their home countries after the dictatorships there are overthrown. These development workers are able to build up social and fair structures in their home countries and contribute to the establishment of a functioning democratic system.