Syria's lost generation: report counts cost of collapse in education system

Karim has not been to school in over two years. Instead he chops wood to help his family survive.

“I can’t go to school as my family needs to eat so I work with my father and my brother instead,” the 11-year-old, who lives in a camp in northern Syria near the Turkish border, told human rights workers. “The axe is very heavy.”

In nearby Lebanon, in a makeshift camp in the agricultural hinterland of the Bekaa Valley, not far from the town of Zahle, another boy chops wood under the watchful eye of his grandmother. During harvest season, many of the boys and girls in the camp will go to work at the nearby farms for as little as $2 (£1.30) a day, said Abu Mohammed, the camp warden.

Only 70 out of about 300 children here go to nearby tent schools run by a local humanitarian agency, Beyond Association.

Karim, from Hama, and the Bekaa Valley’s children are just a handful of about 2.8 million Syrian children who are out of school, their childhood scarred by years of conflict, discrimination and displacement, their education replaced by months of toiling in the fields.

Enrolment rates in Syria have fallen to an average of 50%, down from the prewar levels in which nearly all Syrian children went to school, according to a new report by Save the Children shared exclusively with the Guardian.

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In areas such as like Aleppo which have been devastated by nearly three years of war, enrolment is down to 6%, while half of all refugee children, who number over a million, are out of school. Four out of five refugee children in Lebanon, which hosts the largest number of refugees, do not have access to school.

Those who do are mostly in Lebanese public schools or study in makeshift tents near the informal camps that dot the Bekaa Valley, many skipping classes to work in the fields and earn money for their families.

At least a quarter of schools in Syria have been damaged or destroyed, occupied by displaced families or used for military purposes, according to the report, which estimates that it would cost more than £2bn to repair Syria’s devastated education sector.

Experts and human rights officials have warned of a lost generation of uneducated children in Syria, some of whom have been out of school since shortly after the beginning of the uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

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Now the Save the Children report has put a price tag on the lost generation’s tribulations: Syria’s postwar economy could lose up to £1.5bn a year, or up to 5.4% of GDP, due to loss of future earnings caused by lack of schooling.

The real costs are likely to be higher, since children who do not receive an education are likely to rely to a greater extent on government assistance and to have higher incidence of problems such as child mortality.

Save the Children estimates that Syrian children who did not complete primary school are likely to earn 32% less money in their first job than those who completed secondary school, and 56% less than those who finished university.

The report argues that providing children with schooling during war helps them avoid child labour, early marriage and recruitment by armed groups, and can contribute to their mental resilience. The charity urges the international community to provide $224m in funds that had been earmarked by international organisations for education in Syria.

The report’s release comes ahead of a major donor conference in Kuwait on Tuesday. UN organisations and human rights groups hope that states will pledge new funding for the region to deal with the refugee crisis, which has contributed to bringing international asylum applications to a 22-year high.

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There are nearly four million refugees outside Syria, mostly in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt. In Lebanon, one out of every four residents is a Syrian who fled the war.

Officials hope that donor countries will provide more help to the states hosting the refugees, particularly Lebanon, which does not have formal camps and where refugees live among the population.

Funding shortfalls last year led to a temporary suspension of food aid to refugees, and even now UN agencies have limited aid to the neediest among them, leaving many without basic subsistence.

“It’s the largest humanitarian tragedy of our time,” Ninette Kelley, the UN high commissioner for refugees’ representative to Lebanon, told the Guardian earlier this month in an interview. “We do not want the world to forget that people are suffering here.”

The UN has asked the international community for $2.9bn in funding for its Syria response plan for 2015. Only 9% of that amount has been provided.

“Wealthy donor countries … must dig deeper into their pockets with pledge commitments than they did last year – failure to do so will have a devastating effect on millions of civilians in Syria and its neighbouring countries,” Oxfam said in a statement ahead of the conference. “The number of people in need of assistance in Syria and beyond continues to rise dramatically, while the funding to help them is not keeping up with that need.

“With inadequate aid funds, more people in need will have to resort to desperate survival strategies such as child labour or early marriage,” the statement added.