Germany donated 2 million euros to UNICEF on Friday to be used in the education of Syrian children in Turkey.
German ambassador to Ankara Eberhard Pohl presented the donation to UNICEF Turkey representative Philippe Duamelle at an event at the German Embassy in Ankara.
The donation focuses on children's education, specifically those who had to drop out of school, in cooperation between UNICEF, the National Education Ministry and the Prime Ministry's Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) that supervises Syrian refugee affairs. At the event, Pohl said that children were among the most affected in the Syrian crisis, which has been continuing for five years. He said Germany's donation sought to prevent the emergence of a lost generation.
Turkey is home to nearly 1.8 million Syrians, with more than 260,000 living in refugee camps built by the government in provinces near the Syrian border while others either reside in their own homes, in rented accommodations or squat in abandoned buildings and parks.
According to UNICEF figures, 54 percent of all Syrians who fled to Turkey are children, a percentage roughly corresponding to 900,000 children.
Turkey began taking in thousands of war-torn Syrian refugees who fled the violence that surfaced with the civil war in 2011 and continued apace with the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) in their country. An additional 23,000 have been recently taken in after heated clashes between Kurdish forces and ISIS militants forced them from their homes. UNICEF and the EU, in coordination with Turkish agencies, had already conducted a rehabilitation and education program for 75,000 Syrian children in Turkey. Turkey offers education at refugee camps to ensure a better future for Syrian children, but a large number of Syrian children living outside the camps and in an impoverished state lack educational opportunities, although local and international charities have mobilized to provide schooling through private schools.
Turkey has spent more than $5 billion for Syrian refugees since 2011 and frequently criticizes the international community for doing little to address the plight of refugees. Germany and other European countries are accused of not sharing the burden of Syria's neighbors in tackling the refugee crisis.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has called on European countries to do more to share the burden, particularly in accepting refugees. Even though the number of Syrian refugees has been increasing, the percentage of refugees heading to Europe remains small with only around 4 percent of Syrians having sought asylum in European countries. Syria's neighboring countries - Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq - are home to more than 3 million Syrian refugees, a number that is not comparable with the total number of Syrian refugees that have sought shelter in Europe.
