By supporting the Kayany Foundation and its Ghata Projet, the Boghossiand Foundation empowers ine of the most effective NGOs involved in community education and helps it offer scholarships and protection to the most vulnerable child-refugees – those residing in Informal Tented Settlements in the Bekaa Valley (Lebanon).

Since the beginning of the crisis in Syria, more than 4.5 million Syrians have found refuge in neighbouring countries. By welcoming more than a quarter of these Syrians, Lebanon is coping with the most refugees in the region. There, 80% of Syrian refugee children do not go to school.
In response to this crisis, many NGOs have set up community educational programmes, in addition to measures to protect children and provide nutritional support in areas hosting large numbers of Syrian refugees.

Since the beginning of the crisis in Syria, more than 4.5 million Syrians have found refuge in neighbouring countries. By welcoming more than a quarter of these Syrians, Lebanon is coping with the most refugees in the region. The large scale of this influx has put intense pressure on the Lebanese public sector, especially on the education system. Despite all the Lebanese government’s efforts, and those of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the influx of Syrian children is overwhelming the Lebanese school infrastructure and nearly 80% of Syrian refugee children do not go to school.

The Kayany Foundation, a Lebanese non-governmental organisation founded in 2013 in response to the Syrian refugee crisis, is one of the most effective NGOs involved in this mission. Since its inception, the Gatha Project has initiated four schools in refugee camps in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valey, offering high quality education to 3.500 students aged between 6 to 18 years. Besides these four schools, Kayani has built and runs two secondary and vocational schools for girls aged between 14 and 18 years old.

Ghata is the name given to the portable structures designed by professor Rabih Ghibli of the American University of Beirut and his students. These structures, each approximately 20 square meters in size, can be assembled to create a 40 square meter space which can host up to 35 students.
Easy to assemble and disassemble, and resistant to the most severe weather conditions, these units can be built by refugees using inexpensive local materials. The modularity of these elements makes it easy to adapt them to the specific needs of each site, and also to give them diverse functions, ranging from classrooms to kitchen areas which can then provide refugees students with two daily healthy meals. To this day, Ghata is the only portable structure approved by the Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs.