Students at Ain al-Hilweh’s Marj Ben Amer primary school are among those who will bear the consequences of UNRWA funding cuts. (Credit: João Sousa/L’Orient Today)
AIN AL-HILWEH REFUGEE CAMP, Saida — Mohammed al-Miari is blind, so since he was a small boy, the ninth grader from the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp has done his schoolwork with the help of specially trained learning support teachers who translate his class readings and assignments into braille. Then they translate his completed work into Arabic for his classroom teachers to correct it.
It’s a low-tech and time-consuming solution, but it’s the only one available for now. And so far, it has worked. Miari is at the top of his class and getting ready to take the brevet exam this year.
“If the teachers from this program were gone, I would stop going to school,” Miari told L’Orient Today. “If they stop the program, my life will stop.”
In fact, the learning support program is in danger of stopping, amid an escalating funding crisis at the perennially struggling United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
Mohammed al-Miari said he would probably have to drop out of school if the learning support program ends. (Credit: João Sousa/L’Orient Today)
The potential closure of the program, coming on top of shortages in school supplies and teachers, the increased difficulties many Palestinian families have faced with online learning during the COVID-19 crisis, and growing levels of poverty and unemployment amid Lebanon’s economic crisis, has pushed frustration in some communities to a boiling point.
On Monday, residents of Ain al-Hilweh closed down the UNRWA schools and other facilities in the camp and in neighboring Saida in protest over the cuts.
A new level of crisis
UNRWA’s money problems are not new, but they have worsened dramatically since 2018, when the United States — which used to give about a third of the agency’s budget — stopped its funding.
Now, UNRWA has hit a new level of crisis. Last month, officials announced that the agency had run out of funds completely and would not be able to pay its staff’s salaries for November and December unless it could quickly raise $70 million for its international operations.
“It’s the first time that we’ve actually run out of money,” UNRWA’s director in Lebanon, Claudio Cordone, told L’Orient Today. “Before, we always lived on the brink — it’s always been, ‘We’ve got a month, we’ve got two months to go,’ and then some more donations come in.”
They did get the funds to pay the November salaries, he said, but a few weeks late and only by borrowing from a special UN fund. The December salaries are still not fully funded.
Salem Dib, UNRWA’s chief of education in Lebanon, is confronted by learning support teachers over the impending cut of their program during a site visit in Ain al-Hilweh. (Credit: João Sousa/L’Orient Today)
In the meantime, UNRWA’s Lebanon office has sent layoff notices to about 220 teachers working in the learning support program, who are themselves Palestinian refugees. The teachers help some 6,000 students with special needs and give health counseling to other students.
Unless they can find the funding needed to continue the program to the end of the school year — which Cordone estimated at less than $1.5 million — it will end next month.
Education on the edge
Even before the threatened cut of the learning support program, many Palestinian families were struggling with the switch to online learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
A father of two in Ain al-Hilweh said that he had been happy with the instruction for his young daughters in an UNRWA-run school in the camp before the COVID-19-induced closures.
But now, he said, “The level of learning is falling off a lot — things are not going as they should. It’s complete destruction.” So far, no textbooks have been handed out this year, and with the online lessons, he said, “there are days when there is no electricity, so how can you work on the net?”
Now, teachers and students said the loss of the learning support program is likely to exacerbate the difficulties for the most vulnerable students.
Farah Tahaibish, a first and second grade teacher in Ain al-Hilweh, told L’Orient Today that in pre-COVID-19 days, she might have had 40 to 50 students in a class at any given time.
If the classes return to those levels without support staff to work with the students who need extra help, she said, “there will be students that won’t get their rights in the classroom, because the teacher doesn't have the time to give all the students what they need,” potentially leading to students dropping out or falling behind.
A teacher instructs students at Ain al-Hilweh’s Marj Ben Amer primary school. (Credit: João Sousa/L’Orient Today)
Apart from the impacts on students, Jumana Othman, a learning support teacher in Ain al-Hilweh, said that even though teachers in the program make only a half-time salary, many families depend on it.
“I have only one child, for instance, but there are others who have five or six children,” she said. “And apart from that, we don’t only support our immediate family. We also help to support our parents, aunts and uncles — maybe my friend or neighbor is in need of my help. As much as we’re able to, we try to help each other.”
Hassan al-Seyyed, head of the learning support teachers in the camp, said this is not the first time the program has been threatened by funding issues. But this time the threat appears more serious.
“Two years ago we faced the same crisis, but we didn’t get layoff notices,” he said. “This time we got layoff notices from the administration.”
Seyyed, along with a group of other teachers showed up on Saturday to make their case as a delegation from the UN fund Education Cannot Wait was touring schools in Ain al-Hilweh.
The fund’s director, Yasmine Sherif, said that her organization can offer UNRWA some help, but it can’t offset the budget shortfalls alone.
“What we can do is to provide some support into UNRWA's education programs with the hope that others will follow suit and support the seed funds, the initial funds that we give,” she said. “But for this to work, everyone has to show humanity.”
Cordone said agency officials are actively meeting with potential donors in an attempt to continue the program at least to the end of the school year.
“I’m more hopeful today than I was a week ago, but it is tough because all donors need to make choices, and we need to be careful what we prioritize in an environment where the basic services are under threat,” he said.
Waiting for Washington
In cutting US funding to UNRWA, the Trump administration appeared to be following the line of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had advocated for UNRWA to be dissolved, calling it “an organization that perpetuates the Palestinian problem.”
With Trump now on his way out, President-elect Joe Biden has said he will restore US aid to Palestinians, but he has not said when or whether the UNRWA funding would return to its previous level.
In the meantime, frustration in Lebanon’s Palestinian community has been growing, particularly since UNRWA has given limited aid during the COVID-19 lockdowns and the economic crisis.
Even before Lebanon descended into economic crisis, around two-thirds of Palestinian refugees in the country were living in poverty.
Some 61,000 Palestinian refugees from Lebanon get nominal cash assistance from UNRWA amounting to the equivalent of $130 a year, with 27,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria getting more substantial monthly assistance. The rest of the approximately 200,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon do not get any financial support from UNRWA.
In May, in an attempt to respond to the growing economic pressure amid Lebanon’s countrywide lockdown, the agency distributed one-time payments of LL112,000 to all registered refugees, but since then has not had the funding to continue the payments. The lack of aid has stoked resentment.
The coronavirus pandemic has piled complications and more stress on students and teachers at UNRWA schools. (Credit: João Sousa/L’Orient Today)
“Lebanon doesn’t give us any rights, neither civil nor social rights,” Adnan Rifai, a member of Ain al-Hilweh’s popular committee, told L’Orient Today. As a result, he said, refugees are left dependent on UNRWA.
Rifai sees a conspiracy in the reduction of the agency’s services, which he believes is a “project by Israel and America to force us to emigrate to Europe.”
He sees the same motive behind cuts to education programs: “They want to make us ignorant; they want to send our students to drugs and to things that destroy people. They don’t want a generation that is educated and cultured and is demanding to return to Palestine.”
While Rifai blames UNRWA’s management as much as outside forces, Cordone said the agency is doing its best.
“But then the international community needs to play its part, and if they’ve given us this mandate they should give us the means to implement it,” he said.
Still, he said he doesn’t believe the agency will be allowed to completely collapse.
“There’s no alternative, and none of the host countries are in the position, even if they were willing, to take on an additional load,” he said. “So in the end, the international community would have to step in unless they want to have tens of thousands of people in the streets without any kind of support, with all the consequences that may entail.”