Turkey to build 10 more schools for Syrians in border town

Hatay – Doğan News Agency

DHA Photo

Turkey is preparing to open 10 new education centers for Syrian migrant children in the Reyhanlı district of southern Hatay province, which is located on the border with Syria.

The Reyhanlı Municipality together with the Turkish Education Ministry and the country’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) will open 10 additional “temporary education centers” on top of the 32 centers currently serving the town. 

Reyhanlı Mayor Hüseyin Şanverdi said the municipality will allocate locations for the schools. 

There are around 41,000 school-aged Syrian children among 65,000 Syrians who relocated to Reyhanlı after fleeing clashes in their home country. 

The number of school-aged children out of the 1.7 million Syrian refugees in Turkey is now more than 350,000, according to new figures, demonstrating the size of Turkey’s ongoing refugee burden.

However, only around 140,000 of these children have access to education services, with the remaining 200,000 unable to enroll in school. Syrian refugee teachers have been instructing the 140,000 children who have been provided with education according to the Syrian national curriculum.

As of September 2015, Turkey had received only 25 percent of the funding it requested as part of the 2014 Syria Regional Refugee Response Plan (RRP6). The RRP6, coordinated by the United Nations, brought together more than 155 donors to help Syrian refugees and the local communities hosting them in Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq.

However, the hundreds of thousands of school-aged refugees herald the potential humanitarian impacts of the absence of a viable solution to the Syrian crisis, which shows no signs of slowing.