21/09/2013 09:50
Child labor rising among Lebanon's Syria refugees: UNICEF
Syrian refugees in Lebanon are becoming increasingly reliant on child labor to earn money for families now desperate to maintain basic necessities, the director of the United Nations children's agency said, according to Reuters.
Unlike other host countries, Lebanon has no formal camps to offer a safety net for Syrian refugees. Many are working to provide their own food, clean water and shelter, and children risk being pulled out of school and into the workforce.
"Families are poor and destitute after two and a half years of war ... Often, in order to continue living here they have a lot of expenses they need to pay and the result is kids have to work," said Maria Calivis, the UNICEF regional director for the Middle East and North Africa.
"Many of these children need to get a wage to help their parents have enough to feed them."
In an interview on Thursday, Calivis said that of about 400,000 registered refugee children, only a quarter are enrolled in public schools, leaving aid groups to fill the gap.
Many of those who can study are living in informal tented communities with no permanent classrooms.
Lebanon has not allowed aid groups to set up formal refugee camps, partially out of a reluctance to make the refugee crisis more visible. Lebanese are also wary due their experience with Palestinian refugee camps, which were infiltrated by militants during the country's own 1975-1990 civil war.
"We can't have permanent tents," Calivis said. "Every night, we take the tents down, and every morning they have to be put back up. So imagine, that is 365 days, take tents up and down, for 300,000 refugee students."
Roughly 750,000 Syrian refugees are in Lebanon according to U.N. figures. It predicts that number will rise to 1.3 million by January and to 1.6 million, or 37 percent of the country's pre-crisis population, by the end of next year.