Educate a Child in Gaza
Two years out of a classroom is not a gap a child simply catches up on. Keep one learning.
An entire generation of children in Gaza has lost years of schooling. Buildings that held classrooms are gone or are now shelters; teachers are displaced alongside the families they taught; the ordinary scaffolding of a school year — a timetable, a register, an exam — has come apart.
Education is the part of an emergency response that gets postponed, because food and medicine are obviously more urgent. But a child who is out of school for three years is very often out for good, and the cost of that lands on the rest of their life rather than on this month.
This appeal funds the practical things that keep a child learning where they are now: a kit of supplies, a place in catch-up classes, a teacher paid to keep teaching, a tent or room set up as a learning space.
What your donation pays for
Education aid in Gaza is not about building schools right now — it is about keeping learning going in whatever space exists. In practice that means these costs, which are what we actually pay:
- $30 equips one child with a full school kit — exercise books, pens, a bag, basic materials
- $75 funds a child's place in catch-up classes for a term, closing the gap year by year
- $200 pays a displaced teacher's monthly stipend, which keeps a whole class running
- $1,500 sets up and equips a temporary learning space for a group of children
Why catch-up classes matter more than they sound
A child who missed the year in which reading becomes fluent does not simply resume where their age group is. They sit in a classroom they cannot follow, and within months they stop attending. This is the mechanism by which an interrupted education becomes an ended one, and it is quiet enough that nobody records it happening.
Catch-up classes exist to interrupt that sequence. They are small, they are targeted at the specific skills a child missed, and they are the difference between a child who returns to school and a child who is counted as a dropout three years from now.
Teachers are the cheapest thing we fund
A monthly stipend for a displaced teacher costs $200 and reaches every child in that teacher's class. Measured per child, nothing else we do in education comes close to it — and the teachers are already there, already qualified, already known to the families.
Many are teaching without pay because they cannot bear to stop. A stipend is not a gift to them so much as the removal of a reason they might have to give up.
- One stipend keeps a class of roughly thirty children learning
- Teachers are recruited from the displaced community they serve, so they stay
- Stipends are paid monthly, so a gift that covers a term or a year lets us commit to a teacher in advance
How we work
Our education work runs through local teachers and coordinators who know which children have stopped attending and why. Supplies are bought locally where any supply exists, which is faster and puts money into the local economy.
Every distribution produces a record: which child, which household, what was handed over. We check a sample of households afterwards to confirm what was recorded actually arrived.