Beirut’s youth rebuild the Lebanese capital, brick by brick

With nary employment prospects successful sight, Rafah recovered it hard to enactment positive, amid the demolition of her city. A UNICEF task has since fixed her, and hundreds of others, caller purpose, providing them with an income, and mounting them a daunting task: the clean-up, and rehabilitation, of Beirut.

In the aftermath of the explosion, UNICEF staff, alongside partners connected the ground, conducted house-to-house surveys of families, and a bid of method assessments of larger buildings. They estimated that 300,000 people, including 100,000 children, were straight affected by the disaster.

Rafah is portion of a 1,900 beardown younker network, mobilized by the UN agency, focusing connected cleaning, insignificant rehabilitation of houses and, critically, helping to reconnect homes to municipal and backstage h2o supplies.

The programme, Cash 4 Work, provides cognition and grooming from fully-qualified professionals and, successful a state whose system is successful a captious state, fiscal assistance.

© UNICEF/Fouad Choufany

Twenty-three-year-old Rafah is 1 of hundreds of young Lebanese who participated successful the clean-up and rehabilitation of Beirut.

‘There are nary occupation opportunities successful Lebanon’

The participants, chiefly the astir susceptible and poorer members of society, who cannot find employment successful the section occupation market, are paid to work. The programme is besides playing a portion successful hindrance this fractured nine together, arsenic the young men and women enslaved done teamwork, and a shared extremity of successfully completing their projects and improving their surroundings.

“There are nary occupation opportunities successful Lebanon, truthful this programme helped me”, says Rafah. “Now, erstwhile I look forward, I consciousness I did thing for myself, and this is simply a bully achievement. My property has changed a lot”.

Her colleague, 24-year-old Mohammad, is arsenic upbeat astir his clip spent connected the programme: “We are grooming younker arsenic painters and, successful parallel, we are moving with others connected renovating houses damaged successful the explosions, that haven’t been repaired successful astir a year. I americium blessed that I gained a skill, and I americium inactive learning. To enactment connected my aboriginal and execute my goals, particularly successful these hard times, is thing special”.

© UNICEF/Fouad Choufany

Sin El Fil Public Elementary School is 1 of the Beirut schools that was rehabilitated acknowledgment to UNICEF.

A acquisition successful resilience

Schoolchildren person besides been helping to get the metropolis moving and studying again, keen to instrumentality to lessons arsenic soon arsenic possible. Sisters Mira, 12, and Amal, 13, helped wide debris astatine their schoolhouse successful Achrafieh successful the days pursuing the explosion. “We’ve been going determination for 7 years," Amal says. "It was similar our 2nd home. How could we not beryllium portion of the clean-up?”

More than 160 schools successful Beirut were damaged, littering them with piles of rubble and breached glass, and leaving them without doors and windows. Getting them reopened was yet different situation for the nation’s acquisition system, which was already reeling from the economical situation and the interaction of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ensuring children person entree to acquisition is simply a cardinal precedence for UNICEF. Education provides them with opportunities for the future, and a consciousness of normalcy for some children and parents. It besides provides a feeling of hope, and a harmless abstraction for children experiencing trauma.

© UNICEF/Fouad Choufany

Lebanese schoolgirl Mira, 12, assistance to wide rubble astatine her schoolhouse successful the days pursuing the explosion.

“The explosions accrued the hazard that children, particularly the astir vulnerable, would not beryllium capable to instrumentality to schoolhouse and learn," says Atif Rafique, Chief of Education astatine UNICEF Lebanon. "We needed to exert each effort to rehabilitate schools arsenic rapidly arsenic imaginable amid the chaos and devastation that surrounded them”.

With the enactment of the UN, resources were rapidly mobilized to get lightly to moderately damaged schools backmost successful cognition arsenic soon arsenic possible. Larger-scale reconstruction and rehabilitation were efficaciously coordinated with the UN acquisition agency, UNESCO, and different partners, whilst UNICEF helped to get Beirut’s schools backmost successful signifier and acceptable to invited students to the schoolroom erstwhile full-time acquisition restarted.

“Studying online is okay, but schoolhouse is better," reflects Mira. "Nothing replaces the acquisition of learning successful a classroom”.