The Hariri Foundation provided 52 private schools from across Lebanon with scholarship funds Thursday to pay for the tuition of 3,000 Syrian refugees, as part of a wider campaign to integrate more refugee children into education.
“This generous initiative of supporting 3,000 students in 52 schools across Lebanon aims at helping those students to continue to get an education and helping schools to continue their mission,” Bahia Hariri, Sidon MP and president of the Hariri Foundation for Sustainable Human Development, told the crowd during a speech at a ceremony to distribute the scholarships.
The scholarships are financed by the Saudi government through the Saudi National Campaign to Support the Brothers in Syria and managed by the Hariri Foundation.
The distribution of the scholarships is the first phase of the program and will be followed by the implementation of psychosocial programs. These programs will aim help refugee children, as well as Lebanese children, enrolled in these schools overcome the difficulties they face upon arriving in a new country.
There are over 1.1 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon who fled the civil war, equivalent to a quarter of the country’s population. Almost half of those refugees are children and few of them are enrolled in official schooling.
The psychosocial programs will be implemented by NGOs that will work, among other things, on building cohesion among the Lebanese and Syrian children.
Skoun, a therapeutic clinic that deals with drug-abuse prevention and awareness, will be implementing a drug-prevention program through sustained youth development.
“It’s a step beyond just drug awareness,” Skoun director Nadya Mikdashi told The Daily Star. “We take it a step further to try to implement long-term programs that have a positive impact.”
Skoun’s “Life Skills” program aims at making children more aware of their emotions and why they may feel a certain way, Mikdashi said, as well as teaching skills such as how to build positive relationships.
“Step one is getting Syrian children into schools ... To create some kind of normalcy for them,” she said.
“Number two is to look to their ... social and psychological welfare.”
Kidproof, the Canadian child-safety provider and publisher, is another NGO that will be implementing psychosocial programs at schools across Lebanon. According to Kidproof’s President in the MENA region Darine al-Masri, Kidproof’s program is focused on defusing tension between Syrian and Lebanese children.
“[These Syrian children] have left their homes, they’ve left everything that was familiar. They’ve left the backyard where they used to play. They’ve left that ice cream shop that they used to go to,” she told The Daily Star. “They’ve come to a new country where sometimes they’re being welcomed with open arms but sometimes not so much.”
Bullying of Syrian children is rampant at schools across Lebanon, Masri said, and allowing children to grow up with these prejudices may lead to conflict later on.
Kidproof’s programs will deal with anti-bullying and anti-discrimination themes. With teenage children, they will work on issues of conflict resolution through anger management techniques.
Kidproof’s program will start later this month and they will hold 200 workshops that hope to reach 5,000 children over the weeks that follow. However, Masri is aware of the difficulties of the task ahead.
“The challenge is going to be [changing where the children’s] views are being built,” she explained. “A lot of times the sources of racism are going to be not just the media but things that they are hearing at home.”
“[The trainers’] challenge is going to be to convince the children to do the right thing even if it’s not the popular thing to do. To say no when everybody is saying yes.”
