After years of commitment in Iraq, we opened a new office in the spring of 2016 in the city of Sulaimania, in the Iraqi Kurdistan region, where work began immediately on the 'Taleem Lil jameeh' (Education for All) project, an emergency initiative targeting Syrian refugees and host communities in the area, supported by the Italian Cooperation and managed together with our long-standing Iraqi partners in Al Mesalla.
With a special focus on students and teachers, the project envisages the construction of a Youth Education Centre to offer non-formal education activities to youngsters from the Syrian refugee camp in Arbat, 20 kilometres from Sulaimania: sports, circus, music and theatre will be offered inside a camp housing more than 6,000 people, including more than 1,000 minors.
The construction of the centre will be done using the prefabricated building technique, already used to build the Ashti school in Erbil (link), with the hope that one day the camp's guests will be able to return to their home countries, now devastated by war and the presence of Daesh.
The same project provides for the provision of school transport: in fact, in the entire Sulaimania Governorate, which is currently home to some 30,000 Syrian refugees, only 6 school facilities host small Syrianə students.
Most of the refugees live in the capital, where unfortunately the critical economic conditions of the families often do not allow the children to reach the schools. Therefore, we will provide 7 microbuses, capable of transporting a total of about 200 children daily, who will be able to attend school.
Finally, the teaching staff of the schools in Kobani and Qerga, the same schools that will benefit from the transport service, will receive training in psychosocial support, to enable them to acquire the right tools to work with children who, despite their young age, have already suffered traumas such as war and uprooting from their birth context.
