Highlights
16 days after the storm that hit the Sahrawi refugee camp in Laayoune, 849 families (4245 people), are still suffering from the storm damages, including 406 families that had their houses completely destroyed.
While the new school year will start on 6 September, the damages caused to six of the eight schools and five of the seven kindergartens, are putting children at risk of not being able to go back to school on time.
Thanks to the swift response of the education emergency coordination group, the NGO CISP, supported by UNICEF, was able to start on 30 August the temporary consolidation of the damaged schools. Closely supervised by expert engineers, the work shall be completed within a week. This will allow the partial use of the buildings. The use of eight schools tents and double shifts in some of the sites shall allow all children to go back to school without delay on 6 September.
Additional contingency plans are being developed by humanitarian actors across sectors to strengthen preparedness activities for potential heavy rains in the coming months.
Situation Overview & Humanitarian Needs
The most affected sector remains education, with six of the eight schools and five of the seven kindergartens, having suffered from severe to moderate damages. Children are expected to go back to school from 6 September. The access to school for 8,109 children was temporarily solved thanks to short term solutions(emergency consolidation of damaged buildings/ use of tents as learning spaces and double shift system) decided and validated during the first emergency education meeting.
The emergency consolidation of the damaged buildings started on 29 August in two schools; additional construction teams are being deployed in two other schools and in two KGs. All repairs will be finalized before the end of the week, allowing all schools and KGs to be operational and safe by 6 September. UNICEF is supporting the NGO CISP to undertake this rehabilitation work. Teams of engineers from the NGO and from the local authorities are conducting daily monitoring visits to support the quality of work and a timely implementation. As of 6 September CISP will ensure the availability of Psychosocial Services for children in school while WFP will reinitiate its school feeding programme. UNICEF will need to secure US$286,000 to cover both immediate school repair/consolidation works, and medium-term more extensive rehabilitation needed to ensure a longer term solution.
Education authorities with humanitarian actors and UNICEF initiated the updating of the education contingency plan to upgrade their preparedness plan for potential heavy rains in the coming months. In parallel, UNICEF is working on the preparation of a full-fledged in-service training plan for teachers and school headmasters.