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Individual Commitment

• What led your organization to make the commitment?

  The Syrian crisis has weakened the capacity of the education system to address critical education needs in the country. This has led WATAN to make the commitment.
  
  Prior to the conflict, the primary school enrollment rates in Syria was 99 percent, and middle school enrollment – grades 7 to 9 – was 82 percent. Sadly, today 4 million Syrian children are out of school due to the conflict (2.1 million in Syria and 1.7 million child refugees in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt). All of these reasons led our organisation to make the commitment to the principle of ‘Leave No One Behind’.

• Achievements at a glance

  WATAN has a long history in response to educational needs, and has been able to teach more than 20,000 students in different grades across more than 25 primary and secondary schools, in Syria and Turkey. In addition WATAN has provided many educational services inside Syria. In Aleppo and Idleb city, WATAN educated girls and boys in crisis-affected areas who are not in schools and provided psychosocial support and daily structured PSS activities in schools for children suffering from war and displacement. WATAN provided life skills programs and summer activities to enhance knowledge and improve talents in schools and build the capacities of teaching and administrative staff in order to improve the educational environment. WATAN also restored schools’ basic conditions (sanitation, water tanks, wall paint, repairing doors and windows, and electricity) by doing the needed rehabilitation of school buildings.

• How is your organization assessing progress

  Each WATAN project has an overall objective and each activity has an outcome, output and indicators and means of verification, and we have monitoring and reporting plans.
  
  Monitoring is divided into the following areas:
  - Monitoring of the projects activities to make sure they match the input and output
  - Monitoring the project outputs as milestones to achieve the desired project objective
  
  The project reporting process helps us in the following areas:
  - The achievement of the project objectives.
  - The sustainability of the project strategy and goals.
  - The relevance of the project objectives to the needs of the society.

• Challenges faced in implementation

  • Communication challenges if borders between Syria and Turkey are closed
  • Shelling/ bombardment
  • The change in legal issues that relate to operating schools in Turkey
  • Lack of funding for projects
  • Lack of qualified and experienced teachers and education personnel
  • Instability of student’s attendance in the schools and TLC in the camps
  • Instant intervention of some local authorities in the schools
  • The low educational level of learners due to suspension
  • Lack of certificates / accreditation
  • Child drop-out levels
  • Lack of mechanisms to organize and control relations between actors and formal supervising bodies

• Next step to advance implementation in 2017

  WATAN’s next steps are to provide different kinds of education - formal and informal education, extra-curricular and life skills - to students in camps and schools for orphans in Syria and Turkey.

• If you had one message for the annual report on what is most needed to advance the transformation 'Eliminate gaps in education for children, adolescents and young people', what would it be

  In order to advance efforts in Syria and to ‘Eliminate gaps in education for children, adolescents and young people’, an increase in funding for children's education in Syria is essential.

• Cross cutting issues

  ☑IDPs ☑ People-centred approach ☑ Refugees

• Specific initiatives

  ☑Education Cannot Wait

• Other related Agenda for Humanity transformations

  ☑3A - Reduce and address displacement