Lebanon's children working, missing school to survive economic crisis
4 Min Read
As of now, public school teachers earn between $150 to $300 per month, as the Ministry of Education is increasingly raising alarms about a period of no funding.
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A man walks with his children at the end of their school day in Beirut, Lebanon, Wednesday, Sept. 29, 2021 (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
The education system has taken a hit in Lebanon amid the ongoing economic crisis, but it is the students who have suffered the most. Frequent strikes and school closures have prompted children to be pulled out of schools and some even moved to work.
Since the economy fell through in late 2019, public sector workers, including educators, have constantly held strikes as the amount of their salaries plunged as well, especially after the Lebanese Lira lost more than 98 percent of its value against the dollar.
Rana Hariri, 51, says her nine-year-old daughter Aya "repeatedly asks me: 'When will I go back to school?' But I do not know what to tell her", adding: "My children stayed at home for three months last year due to the strikes".
She expressed hope of her 14-year-old daughter Menna someday becoming a doctor: "I just hope she'll be able to go to school in the first place", noting: "For the past four years, teachers have failed to secure their rights, while our children miss out on basic education."
As of now, public school teachers earn between $150 to $300 per month, as the Ministry of Education is increasingly raising alarms about a period of no funding.
Children bearing the brunt
Although the school year kicked in despite uncertain dates at first, her two sons, aged 13 and 17, began work with their father, a plumber.
"I want them to have a degree... but this country is killing their future," she said.
According to UNICEF, the United Nations' children's agency, Lebanon's children have "experienced devastating disruption to their education", but that disruption was the result of the economic crisis, the coronavirus pandemic, the deadly 2020 blast in Beirut's port, and the strikes that closed schools.
UNICEF Lebanon stated that "A growing number of families" no longer have the ability to afford "the cost of education including transport to school, food, textbooks, stationery, and clothes", with at least 15% of households removing children from schools, per a UNICEF June report, up from 10% a year ago.
The report noted that 1 in 10 families have been forced to have their children work to sustain the family.
Atif Rafique, chief of education at UNICEF Lebanon, said: "Being out of school exposes children... to violence,... poverty," and thus puts girls at risk of child marriage, while Education Minister Abbas Halabi repeatedly warned this month that "public education is in danger".
"The most urgent problem today is financial," Halabi said, assuring that his ministry is striving to secure funding for the upcoming year, since the ministry mainly depends on government credit lines and donor funding from the World Bank and the UN, to educate both Lebanese children and Syrian refugees.
The donors informed Halabi, as he stated, of their inability to afford to fund public school employees.
A catastrophe waiting to happen
A new Human Rights Watch report demonstrated that the Education Ministry cut the number of teaching days "citing financial constraints" - from 180 in 2016 to around 60 in just the past two years.
Ramzi Kaiss, HRW's Lebanon researcher, clarified that year after year, the ministry has not implemented a plan that would secure the funds needed to keep schools open without interruption.
"If we're going to have a fifth year that is lost or interrupted, it's going to be catastrophic," he relayed to AFP.
Farah Koubar, 35, expressed her fears of not being able to send her kids to school soon. "I'm afraid they will miss out on their education," she told AFP from her home in Beirut.
"Every year life becomes more difficult," she noted, recalling the difficulty of having to ask acquaintances for help to keep her children sustained.
"Everything is expensive, food, water, gasoline -- even bread."
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