BEIRUT: The enrollment rate of Lebanese children is among the highest in the region, thanks in large part to the country’s intensive efforts to reduce the number of children who are not in school, a UNICIF official has said.
At this week’s launch of a U.N. regional report on children out of school, UNICEF and UNESCO representatives reported that across the MENA region, 21 million children are either not enrolled, or at risk of dropping out of school.
“This represents one in four children,” UNICEF Regional Director Maria Calivis said.
While the study did not capture in-depth statistics in Lebanon, Calivis said that Lebanese school children are in a relatively positive position compared to other countries in the region.
“The good news in Lebanon is that it has one of the lowest number of [Lebanese] children out of school,” she said, adding that out of all countries in the region, Lebanon has made one of the biggest efforts to reduce the number of children not attending school.
Calivis told The Daily Star that as of 2012, 2 percent of children in Lebanon had never been enrolled in school, based on Education Ministry statistics. Furthermore, 70,000 out of 1,000,000 children are currently not enrolled in either primary or secondary school.
She said that in lower secondary school, ages 12-15, Lebanon’s dropout rate has reached 50,000 students. At this age, boys are at heightened risk of dropping out, often out of the need to supplement family income, she explained.
The situation is more dismal for the 270,000 school-aged Syrian refugee children in Lebanon. Calivis explained that the Lebanese public school system isn’t able to absorb all of the Syrian children in need.
As the protracted conflict in Syria reaches its fifth year, U.N. agencies are supporting the education needs of over 100,000 Syrian refugee children in Lebanon with additional morning and afternoon shifts in public schools, particularly in vulnerable areas such as the Bekaa Valley and North Lebanon.
The regional report gathered in-depth information on the numbers and determinants of school dropout risk and non-enrollmentin nine Arab countries: Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia and Yemen.
“In the last decade, impressive progress has been made in the region to reduce the number of out of school children, leading to a 40 percent decline in the number in the MENA region in the past decade,” Calivis said. She cautioned that armed conflict, particularly in Syria and Iraq, has caused a reversal of this progress, as 3,000,000 children from those countries are not enrolled in school due to forced migration and destroyed infrastructure.
Across the MENA region, children living in poor, rural areas, whose parents have low education levels, are the most vulnerable to dropping out and non-enrollment in school.
The report found that the children most at risk of non-enrollmentschool were girls from poor, rural areas.
Females encounter gender-specific dropout risk factors, including social pressures and the threat of early marriage.
Calivis described in-depth country reporting on out-of-school children as “an ongoing project” and said that the U.N. is interested in carrying out a similar study on Lebanon, pending the Education Ministry’s request.
Building on information from Calivis, the UNESCO program specialist, Yayoi Segi-Vitchek, stressed the importance of addressing the underlying causes of dropping out in Lebanon, particularly when discussing policy.
“There are issues in the education system that need to be addressed apart from the [Syrian refugee] crisis itself,” including teacher qualifications and the use of government data to shape education policy, she said.
According to Segi-Vitchek, access to education is tightly linked to health outcomes, especially in early childhood.
“We are talking about very young children, on the way to developing their bodies and cognitive health, that’s why you can’t just talk about academic learning, you need to also talk about nutrition and health,” she said, adding that worldwide, teachers serve as one of the first facilitators of health in children’s lives by promoting immunization and detecting malnutrition.
“Teachers should be trained to address these issues in the school setting,” she said.
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