A time of crisis

I arrived to Kayany in September of 2014 after prototyping a micro-loan product for technical and vocational studies. Kayany was formed in response to the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II, and today is the leading provider of informal education to Syrian refugees with nine schools spread across the Bekaa Valley.

Informal Tented Settlements contain anywhere between 2-300+ tents. My work involved locating and planning where the schools would reach the most children.

Context

In 2014 over 500,000 Syrian Refugee Children were out of school in Lebanon.

It’s no easy feat to host the estimated 1.7 million Syrian refugees that have flooded into Lebanon since the Syrian War began in 2011. Still in the process of recovering from its own civil strife that officially concluded just two decades prior, the outlook for Syrian refugees that escaped to Lebanon was becoming increasingly fraught.

With no end to conflict in sight, a whole generation of youth had their future at stake due to limited access to schools and basic services. Many refugee families settled into informal tented communities that emerged out of haphazard planning and regulation in the Bekaa Valley.

Bar Elias, Lebanon – A look from above of the Telyani school located within an ITS. We would conduct extensive community outreach prior to implementing any project.

Kayany is a design-centric NGO that has partnered with the Faculty of Architecture at the American University of Beirut for the design of its schools, as well as with Catalytic Action – a multidisciplinary design studio that built this playground with student ideas at the Nahriya School.

Majdel Aanjar, Lebanon – A family of Syrian refugee children at the Al-Jeled ITS. Children as young as the ones pictured here were often sent off to work on potato fields during harvest season.

Kayany not only provides direct access to education, but also nutritional programs, space for play, as well as child protection services.

Challenges

As the duration of crisis progresses, the chances of millions of children becoming a “lost generation” increases.

Of the 500,000+ Syrian children who were out of school, roughly half could be found living in Informal Tented Settlements (ITS) that dotted some of the Eastern Mediterranean’s most fertile agricultural land nestled in the Bekaa Valley.

NGOs attempting to provide goods and services to these communities experienced trouble accessing them due to the informality and scattered reach of settlements. Access to schooling was particularly challenging due to limiting factors of distance, transport, a bilingual Lebanese curriculum, bullying, a lack of legal residency in Lebanon, and often the need for children to work as they were the only capable breadwinners in splintered and separated families.

Malala at Kayany

Impact

My experience at Kayany was instrumental to transitioning the organization from an idea to a global leader of informal education, as well as my own interests in community development and solving societal challenges. Today, Kayany retains the long–standing partnerships I helped forge with the Malala Fund, The American University of Beirut, The Ministry of Social Affairs, and the European Commission among others. Working under conditions of ubiquitous uncertainty has also exposed me to many design and leadership challenges. Lessons that go a long way in today’s accelerating world.

Portable Schools