Nearly three million Syrian children are not attending school due to the fighting raging in their homeland, an international charity group said Thursday, as the country’s intractable conflict threatens to deny an entire a generation of education.
The report by the Britain-based Save the Children shows the devastating impact the conflict, now in its fourth year, has had on education and the future of a generation of young Syrians.
Save the Children said that hundreds of thousands of displaced children are struggling to enroll for school in their host countries and in Syria. Meanwhile, only around half of the country’s 1.5 million refugee children are attending school, the report noted, citing a variety of reasons, including prohibitively high school fees and the need for children to work for their families to survive.
Countries like Egypt demand a dizzying array of official papers that most refugee parents do not possess. In Lebanon, there’s simply no space in many schools, with the education system overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of child refugees. Around 80 percent of Syrian refugee children in Lebanon don’t attend school, according to the report.
