UN’s Push to Provide Syrian Children Greater Access to Education

The United Nations Special Envoy for Education, Gordon Brown, is championing plans to get 1 million Syrian children back into education before the new term begins this September.

As part of this initiative, Syrian children currently residing in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey could be educated at a cost of $10 a week using a “double shift system”, with local children attending classes in the morning and the same teachers, classrooms and curriculum being used to teach Syrian children in the afternoon. The scheme has already been implemented in parts of Lebanon and Brown is calling for it to be rolled out to 1 million children across the region this month, at a cost of €250 million.

According to Brown, lack of funding is currently preventing the scheme from benefitting more children. Earlier this month, he told the World Economic Forum in Davos that despite the Lebanese Minister for Education, Elias Bou Saab, being prepared to offer half a million Syrian children an education, funding currently only stretches to a 100,000 of them.

With the number of refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) reaching a level not seen since the second world war, international aid has tended to prioritise life-saving provisions such as food, water and basic medicines. Last year only 1% of humanitarian aid went towards education, according to the UN Envoy for Education, and it is on the decline. UNICEF’s $900 million appeal for 2015 for programmes in Syria and surrounding countries is less than half funded.

Speaking on behalf of the UN, Brown explained that “traditionally education has fallen through the net because humanitarian aid goes to food and shelter, and development aid does not plan for emergencies.”

Organisers of the “no lost generation” initiative, which was launched in October 2013 by the UN Envoy for Education and other partners, see education of child refugees as vital for a number of reasons.

“A child outside of a safe learning environment is a child at greater risk of abuse and exploitation”, said UNICEF Lebanon’s Acting Representative Luciano Calestini. “Education is crucial for children…not only as an education response, but as a protection response, and as a way of maintaining social cohesion”.

Brown has highlighted the issue of child trafficking and the particular vulnerability of refugee girls to forced marriage in Lebanon, where there is no minimum legal age to marry.

Wider consequences of better education provisions for refugee children have also been discussed. Brown has claimed that greater funding of education in countries neighbouring Syria would help to reduce the number of parents resorting to making dangerous journeys with their children across the Mediterranean. He believes that we ignore the importance of educating these children “at our peril”.

The UN’s push for international funding comes when as many as 5 million displaced children are about to enter their 5th year of no school. The UN estimates that 2 million Syrian child refugees are currently left out of education, with the same number again unable to attend school inside their home country.  Around half the number of displaced Syrian children are living in countries neighbouring Syria.

Related