The Bezos Family Foundation along with the IRC and Global Nomads Group launched the Students Rebuild Healing Classrooms Challenge which will help Syrian refugee children in Lebanon and Iraq recover from crisis.

The protracted refugee crisis in Syria has highlighted unique challenges and opportunities facing humanitarian efforts in complex urban environments, suggesting a need for greater innovation to respond effectively to the evolving economic and protection challenges faced by displaced persons.

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, UNICEF, and IRC, the International Rescue Committee, today issued a Roadmap for action to improve the situation of refugee and migrant children arriving and staying in Europe without their parents or care givers. The Roadmap highlights the need to identify children, register them through child-friendly procedures, and build a relationship of trust with them as early as possible. Ensuring that a well-trained guardian takes immediate responsibility for the child, engaging cultural mediators, and mobilizing members of host communities are critical measures that can help build a trusting relationship and protect children from smugglers, traffickers or family pressure.

IRC has been working in Cameroon since early 2016, and is now expanding operations further north into the Logone et Chari department in order to meet the needs of refugees and internally displaced people.

13-year old Zain from Karachi, Pakistan is a student in IRC’s Refugee Youth Summer Academy preparing for school in New York this fall.