Dubai: It is the international community’s responsibility to provide education to hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrian refugee children, Shaikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Culture and Knowledge Development, told Gulf News on Tuesday.
Shaikh Nahyan’s comments come just days after Jordan’s Deputy Prime Minister Mohammad Thneibat warned that not providing education to Syrian refugee children risks creating a new generation of extremists.
“We all have global responsibility and we all have to share this global responsibility wherever there is a need for it. As the UAE we are doing very well,” Shaikh Nahyan told Gulf News at an Indian business conference in Dubai.
The UAE has donated Dh15 million to provide education services to Syrian refugees, according to a September 2015 report and has donated a total of Dh2.1 billion in direct aid related to the crisis.
Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey are providing shelter to millions of refugees who have fled the five-year-old Syrian conflict. But the crisis has put pressure on education resources in the countries neighbouring Syria where many classrooms are now overcrowded. Thousands more refugee children have been unable to enrol in local schools because of the unavailability of space or red tape.
Jordan is providing education to 145,000 Syrian children at a cost of $300 million (Dh1.10 million) a year with the international community contributing less than 36 per cent of the costs, Thneibat said in Dubai on Sunday.
