Lebanon: Credible Plans Needed on Education Crisis

Donor governments should address the unprecedented education crisis in Lebanon at the funding conference on May 10, 2022, in Brussels, the Center for Lebanese Studies and Human Rights Watch said today. Public schools for hundreds of thousands of Lebanese and Syrian students have largely been closed for the last three school years.

“Donors have plowed more than a billion dollars of humanitarian aid for education into Lebanon over five years, yet we have seen an avoidable and worsening education disaster,” said Dr. Maha Shuayb, director of the Center for Lebanese Studies. “The watchword of the Brussels conference should be accountability.”

Since October 2019, schools have been largely closed following protests against government corruption, the Beirut port explosion, the Covid-19 pandemic, rising xenophobia, and teachers’ strikes as the economic crisis devalued their salaries by 90 percent.