The partner countries involved in this proposal, namely Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq (but also some of the Programme Countries involved, such as Turkey and Germany) are experiencing a very critical situation due to the high number of refugees present on their territory: most of these are Syrian citizens, and include a high percentage of former University students who had to interrupt their academic curriculum.The main specific objective of RESCUE is to help the Partner Country Universities in structuring an effective response to this problem, by creating ad hoc units (the Refugee Student Operational Support Unit – R-SOS), whose mission is to structure specific services supporting the refugee students in resuming their academic training path. The analysis carried out by the target Universities has shown that each one of them has different approaches and constraints vis-à-vis this problem, therefore ad hoc solutions must be implemented in each one of them.Hence each EU university with an experience in dealing with this issue has cooperated with the Universities of one specific MENA Country: TU Berlin supported the Lebanese Universities, Aydin University supported the Jordanian Universities whereas Barcelona University supported the Iraqi Universities.One major change in the partnership composition was made in order to increase the project impact in terms of refugees to be reached: in January 2019 the Lebanese International University was added as a partner and had to make a big effort to catch up with the other partners. Once the R-SOS units have become operational during the first half of 2019, the services they deliver help the refugee students in resuming their academic training path, in some cases by accessing the standard curricula on the same basis as all the other students, in some other cases by following ad hoc training courses providing them with basic skills and competencies useful for employment purposes.Therefore the setting up of the R-SOS units is helping in improving the situation of the refugee students either by supporting them in getting a job in the hosting countries either in preparing them for returning to their origin country once the crisis is over.