How do you educate an extra 500,000 children?
The conflict in Syria is now in its fifth year. Fourteen million children are now affected across the sub-region and almost two million of those are living as refugees in neighbouring countries.
As a result of the fighting, more than three million children are out of school and unable to continue with their education. Families still in Syria are terrified to send their children to school — where the school is still standing — and those who have fled the violence to neighbouring countries are faced with school systems overstretched and unable to absorb the sheer numbers of refugees wanting to enrol.
Nowhere is this problem more acute than in Lebanon. Since 2011, 1.2 million people have fled the conflict to this country, representing more than one-quarter of its total population. Of this 1.2 million, nearly half are thought to be children. That is 500,000 children who have had to pack their bags and flee their homes as fighting draws closer. 500,000 children who have lost family members or parents. 500,000 children who have left their schools, their friends and everything that is familiar to them.
The Lebanese government has shown great commitment to ensuring each and every one of these children is able to access basic education. It has opened its schools to run a ‘double shift’ system which allows Lebanese children to be taught in the mornings and Syrian children to be taught in the afternoons, using the same schools, the same teachers and the same curricula.
But educating an additional 500,000 children is not cheap. The Ministry of Education has calculated the additional cost to be $600 per child per year. With funding received from the international community, the government of Lebanon has been able to enrol 170,000 refugee children into the second school shift this month. A fantastic achievement.
But while we recognise the opportunity offered to those 170,000 children, we cannot ignore that there is an even larger number still being denied an education as a result of a conflict they had no part in causing. The government of Lebanon has the capacity to offer school places to even more children, but they can not and should not have to bear this cost themselves.
This year I have had the opportunity to visit Lebanon on several occasions and see this double shift system in action. During these visits I have met children who have experienced things in their short lives that I can only imagine. Many of these children are attending school for the first time in months, even years.
Yet their circumstances have done nothing to dampen their dreams for the future. Asked what they want to be when they grow up and you get the same answers you would the world over — a teacher, a doctor, a journalist. Going to school provides these children with a sense of normalcy, a routine. It is a protective environment which gives them an opportunity to play, to be children and to secure a brighter future for themselves.
Education is often the first casualty in times of crisis. Of the 59 million children out of school around the world it is estimated that half of these live in countries affected by conflict. A World at School is campaigning to ensure that no child grows up without an education. No matter where they live.
Join us to call on international donors to do more to ensure that every child in Lebanon is in school and learning. Join #UpForSchool.
