The Representative of the the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) to the Arab Republic of Egypt and to the League of Arab States, Dr. Hanan Hmadan, met with the Egyptian Minister of Education and Technical Education in Egypt (MOE), Reda Hegazy earlier this week.
During the meeting, Hamdan commended the role the Government of Egypt plays in providing access to education to the majority of refugees and asylum-seekers and acknowledged the challenges the Ministry of Education faces to sustain this access. She also highlighted the collaboration UNHCR has had with the Ministry over the past decades, through which a number of education and construction projects valued at more than USD 6 million have been implemented.
The Egyptian Minister thanked UNHCR for its support and discussed some of the joint areas of collaboration through which UNHCR can provide additional support to public schools hosting large numbers of refugee children.
Very recently, UNHCR has supported the establishment of 15 computer labs in 15 public schools in and around Aswan, hosting refugee and Egyptian children. The intervention aimed at supporting the Ministry’s plans to enhance the use of digital equipment in schools, which contributes towards the achievement of the 2030 agenda of digitizing the education system across the country.
UNHCR has been working closely with MOE in Egypt to support public education in Egypt, which is currently provided to students from Sudan, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen at equal footing to Egyptians. In the 2022/2023 academic year, 60,482 refugee students were enrolled in public schools in all governorates.
Over the past decade, UNHCR and MOE have collaborated on several projects, including the construction and refurbishment of around 170 classrooms, the establishment of 30 computer labs in public schools, and the provision of digital infrastructure to 57 public schools through the Smart Classroom Project. This project has covered 720 classrooms at the preparatory school level.
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