The Sadad Humanitarian Organization continues to carry on its project, aiming at supporting a safe and fair education for children based in the Shashabo Mountain, southern rural Idlib. The project started at the onset of the new school year and is yet ongoing.

The organization also works on providing services to children, forced to abandon their areas due to the escalating violence and the shelling, which began in February 2019.

Sadad is a charitable developmental humanitarian organization, seeking to present influential developmental, educational and training-based projects in rural Idlib, through which it attempts to bridge the gap in the educational process and offer children moral support.

In the areas of rural Idlib and Hama, from where residents were coerced to flee, 75 thousand children need both official and unofficial educational services, in addition to psychological support, Hamza al-Yousef, the Director of the Safe and Fair Education project, told Enab Baladi.

What Does the Project Provide?

The projects aim to support the educational process in the regular schools, targeting, thus, 12 schools in the Shashabo Mountain, through providing salaries, supplies and the renovation of the target schools.

According to the organization’s estimates, 3200 teachers need educational supplies and materials, salaries and training courses.

The project targets 3350 children, whom it offers the official education, adopting the curricula usually utilized by the public schools in Idlib governorate, through coordination with the Idlib’s Education Directorate, in addition to summer class, representing unofficial education for children.

The project aims to raise the awareness of student’s families concerning the importance of school and benefits of education, for convincing parents is one of the key challenges that the organization is facing in the less open agricultural areas, as Hamzah al-Yousef informed Enab Baladi.

The number of parents targeted by the awareness sessions amounts to 890 persons, and 100 teachers from different specialties are involved in the project’s implementation and seeking the realization of its objectives in the area.

Challenges and Obstacles

More than 551 thousand persons were forced to leave their areas due to the last military campaign, which the Russian and regime forces initiated against the area. In addition to escapees, 769 civilians, including 221 children died, according to the Response Coordinators’ statistics, which cover the period from February 2 to June 17, 2019.

The massive waves of displacement, added to the ongoing bombardment and lacking security in the area, pose themselves as the principal challenges to the implementation of the educational project, for several of its summer activities were obstructed due to the organization’s inability at gathering the students in one place.

Despite this, the organization managed to gather a small number of students from many of the areas that witnessed displacement and put massive efforts to continue providing them with the summer courses.

The Idlib Governorate Education Directorate, as it posted on its Facebook page on June 18, documented 62 schools as being subject to destruction, out of 1194 ones, since the start of the escalation, in addition to the death of 21 teachers and 277 male and female students, as well as the displacement of 150 thousand students.