Baghdad – WAA – Hassan Al-Fawaz
Omar Wahab, Education Program Officer at the UNICEF Country Office in Iraq, confirmed today, Tuesday, that the Back to Education Program has reduced the number of school dropouts.
Wahab told the (INA): “The pilot program for returning to education began in 2023 at the request of the Minister of Education, as UNICEF went to Maysan Governorate, where 5,700 dropout cases were diagnosed and the largest number of them were returned to school seats in formal and non-formal education.”
He added, “After that, the organization headed, based on the request of the Prime Minister’s Advisor for Education Affairs, to Nineveh Governorate as well, where 13,000 dropout cases were diagnosed and the largest number of them were returned to formal and informal education,” stressing “work to return the largest number of dropout students to school in all other governorates.”
He continued, “We hope to reach 150,000 children who have dropped out of school in the first phase,” explaining that “some cases go back to the Ministry of Education, but other cases go back to the Ministry of Health, and there are also cases of lack of identification papers that go back to the Ministry of Interior, so through this program we are trying to involve more than one ministry in this work.”
He pointed out that “UNICEF works in other fields, including environmental sanitation, child protection, and other educational programmes, and it also has a department for behaviour change, which plays a prominent role in the campaign programme.”