Education in crisis

Start of our 7th school year in the North of Lebanon

For more than two months, the Lebanese people are in the streets. The whole country is blocked and more than a quarter of the entire population joined the protests against the ruling class of politicians. We have seen many protests in Beirut over the last years, but never it spread to all regions of the country. All banks, schools and universities have been closed for several weeks and most highways are blocked. The demonstrations have remained peaceful over the first weeks but some of the ruling parties have recently tried to stir up sectarian hatred.

The whole approach of Relief & Reconciliation is put to a test in this tense situation. We have united all communities in Akkar, the poorest region of Lebanon, around our cause: the future of the youth. We have managed to enrol more than 1,200 Syrian refugees into public schools. And also in this seventh school year since we started operations, we managed to keep our classes running. So far, more than 150 students are attending our daily homework help sessions and basic literacy and numeracy classes. We finished the last school year 2018/19 with more than 300 students, also thanks to a grant of SlovakAid. We want to get there again this year.

In this new school year, we started a third informal camp school in the vicinity of Kousha, Akkar. Like in the first two camp schools in Sahl Miniarah and Tell Aabbas, the daily classes are run by Syrian teachers. We managed to enrol all kids of the camp and the neighbouring collective shelters into public schools. But many of these kids have never hold a pencil in their life. They need much support for being able to cope with the Lebanese curriculum, which is partly taught in French. There are still thousands of Syrian students in our area out of school. EUR 25 per month are enough to provide daily homework help and basic alphabetisation classes to one child.