Highlights
• Across the region, with the start of the school year approaching, UNICEF and partners are gearing up to support learning opportunities.
• In Syria, UNICEF is preparing for the launch of the Back to Learning (BTL) initiative 2015/2016. The BTL initiative aims to reach over 1 million children with education supplies and approximately 5.5 million community members with education messages via media campaign. Unique to this year’s campaign is the launching of the self-learning programme, which targets 315,000 out-of-school children this year.
• In Lebanon, the renovation and/or rehabilitation work started in 61 schools and water samples were taken in order to decide which filtration system to use. Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MEHE) engineers visited the sites to ensure implementation of MEHE standards and the ‘’Effective School Profile’’ standards.
• In Jordan, UNICEF and its 20 partners worked closely pursuing the roll out of the Makani-My Space programme across Jordan. While 128 Makanis are currently in place, another 93 centres have been identified and are expected to be in place by the end of the year. UNICEF partners reported to have reached 106,283 children through this programme, throughout camps and host communities this month alone.
• In Turkey, the success of UNICEF’s incentive program for Syrian volunteer teachers has led to rapid scale-up of the initiative, with 5,503 teachers currently supported monthly (exceeding the total sector annual target by 63%) – improving quality of learning for more than 175,000 Syrian refugee children.
• In Egypt, UNICEF supported 13,181 Syrian children in 236 public schools in year 2014 by providing them with teachers’ trainings and schools rehabilitation. Today, the total number of Syrian children (age 6 – 17) enrolled in 3,000 schools in Egypt in 27 governorates is 39,500 according to MoE updated statistics.