Emergency Aid for Displaced People in Kurdish Iraq

IsraAID has put an emphasis on educational programming, largely as a result of the extended periods of time that displaced people have now been in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), and children are out of safe and supportive learning environments.

The educational initiative STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Maths) is a ground-breaking program connects between theoretical studies and their practical applications in the world. The aim of STEM is to improve student grades, increase their tangent thinking, resourcefulness, and creativity, ultimately leading to better access to livelihood opportunities in the future. It involves the introduction of additional workshops into the students’ formal or informal school system, with an emphasis on practical experiments.

We have continued to work with the government to pique the interest of the schools and gain their active participation. We have been busy training teachers in how to administer the project. Once the teachers were training we began implementing the project with both teachers and children. The project was aimed at the middle year’s primary grades and middle school ages. We have now run three rounds of the project each as successful as the last. For each of these projects, we made a record, by photographing and videoing each session. We were constantly getting feedback from the teachers, the administrations, and even the students. That way we knew how successful we were with the program. As we wrapped up phase one the teachers and schools have been interested in our continuation of the project and expansion. IsraAID intends to do both of these things.

The direct beneficiaries of the project were the students who participated in the Phase 1 program. There were approximately 2,600 students. Indirectly, there were another 160 teachers, who were also involved. The beneficiaries are about equal in number between males and females. Even the teaching staffs are close to gender-equal. In all of the schools, the same grades levels were involved, and these were mostly the middle primary/ middle school grades.

Our main achievement is the successful completion of Phase 1 of our STEM projects for the schools. Our main goal is to keep providing these schools with similar projects, and keep expanding the program so that we can reach more students and schools, and get more deeply into subject matter. We have now reached the point where we have successfully completed Phase 1 for several schools, and we are now expanding into a Phase 2 program, which will involve a great deal more materials and information. This is a large project with a lot of materials, plus a major translation program.

The planning and implementation for all of this is extensive, but will soon come to fruition. Meanwhile we are expanding Phase 1 to a number of new schools, and will continue with this very successful program, when we receive the materials, in the meantime, we are working closely and extensively with the teachers and schools to get them prepared for all of these new programs that they will be involved with.

The future plan for the program is to continue working with the schools we have been working with, and add new ones to the project. Needless to say, many schools are asking if we can work with them. This year we will be adding new schools and will work with them on Phase 1, which was already done by the other schools last year. The original schools will move to Phase 2. This will involve more students, and the materials will include written lessons, mainly in science. This will mean that the teachers will have lots of material to work with, and will need to be trained in how its used, especially because, each unit of study has experiments and projects to go with it. This will be good for the teachers, to expand their knowledge and the knowledge of the children. This will involve translating English lessons into Arabic. The good part is that the books created will be reusable. The new schools will move through Phase 1 and into Phase 2, while the Phase 2 schools will expand these programs to more students in the schools. We also hope that the subject matter will be expanded to new courses and units.