Qatar’s Education Above All Foundation aims to provide primary schooling to more than 1 million Syrian refugees by next year, Sheikha Moza has announced.

The former first lady and founder/chairperson of EAA made the pledge yesterday during a conference about Syria in London.

In a statement, she said:

“We have already enrolled half a million children in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon into quality primary education. By 2017, we hope to have more than doubled that number to 1.1 million.”

At least three million Syrian children have had their schooling cut short by the ongoing crisis, Sheikha Moza’s office said.

The announcement to help Syrian kids came shortly after the UN suspended peace talks with stakeholders in the conflict this week, suggesting that the internal turmoil in the country would continue for some time longer.

Educate a child

Since it launched in 2012, the Educate a Child initiative has been working to find and replicate innovative teaching solutions to help millions of out-of-school children around the world learn.

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For example, some children in Bangladesh learn in boats, with their “floating schools” acting not only as a bus to collect the students, but also as a classroom that provides education.

Speaking at the Syrian conference this week, Sheikha Moza said her charity would continue to look for these kinds of solutions:

“Refugee children across the region have diverse needs and conditions that cannot always be met with a one size fits all solution in the formal education setting.

When formal education systems cannot absorb students, EAC steps in to offer alternative education programmes in flexible learning sites. We also support remedial, bridging, and accelerated programs to compensate for lost time.”

Thoughts?