Clooneys fund schools in Lebanon to educate 3,000 refugee children
GEORGE and Amal Clooney wll help 3,000 Syrian refugee children go to school this year in Lebanon, where hundreds of thousands are not getting an education.
The actor and his wife, a British human rights lawyer who was born in Lebanon, said their foundation would support seven schools in a bid to prevent thousands of young people from becoming “a lost generation”.
More than a million Syrians, including more than 500,000 children, are registered as refugees in Lebanon after fleeing Syria’s devastating six-year war.
Unicef, the children’s charity, said that close to 200,000 Syrian refugee children in Lebanon were out of school. The initiative will be funded through a $2million (£1.5million) partnership announced by The Clooney Foundation for Justice with Google, in addition to a $1 million (£750,000) technology grant from Hewlett Packard. The partnership with Unicef will pay for transportation, school supplies, computers, content, curriculum and teacher training, the Clooneys said in a statement.
“Thousands of young Syrian refugees are at risk – the risk of never being a productive part of society. Formal education can help change that,” they said.
“We don’t want to lose an entire generation because they had the bad luck of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The couple, who married in 2014, welcomed their first children – a twin boy and girl – in June.