Rehabilitation of schools in Syria

After ten years of civil war, Syria is devastated. SOLIDARITÉS INTERNATIONAL is undertaking infrastructure rehabilitation work in order to contribute to the sustainable recovery of the population.

The ten-year civil war in Syria has devastated the country. The human toll is very high and the health, economic and political situation is catastrophic. There is also considerable damage to access to basic services and infrastructure, particularly in the education sector. In 2020, it was estimated that 2.45 million children were not in school and 1.6 million were at risk of dropping out*. These figures did not take into account the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impact on children’s schooling. In the north-east region, one of the most common coping mechanisms today is to get children into the labour market and/or into marriage, to help sustain families.

Considering the inability of the administration to meet all the needs of the population, SOLIDARITÉS INTERNATIONAL has undertaken to rehabilitate the main school infrastructure in the city of Raqqa and the governorate of Hassaké. With the support of the Crisis and Support Centre (CSC), our teams have been repairing buildings, repairing water and sanitation systems, installing electricity and photovoltaic panels, and providing the necessary furniture. In view of the obvious success of these initial renovations, our NGO is planning to extend its action to other destroyed or damaged establishments.

SOLIDARITÉS INTERNATIONAL’s interventions are carried out in strict compliance with the “Do no harm” principle, which means that humanitarian actors must ensure that they do not cause further damage and suffering as a result of their actions. “In the context of this rehabilitation work, this means, in concrete terms, ensuring that all the buildings have been cleared by demining teams and that the school will only be used for educational purposes,” says Thomas Janny, head of actions in Syria at SOLIDARITÉS INTERNATIONAL.

In the long term, this project will increase access to safe and quality educational opportunities in the targeted areas. It will also ensure an improvement in the level of hygiene in the areas concerned, through functional sanitary facilities, distribution of hygiene kits and hygiene promotion sessions for pupils.

This programme is part of a wider strategy to rehabilitate the country’s main public and private infrastructure in order to help restore the resilience of the populations affected by the conflict.