The European Union has announced the first recipients of an initiative formed following the bloc’s Nobel Peace Prize win in October.
The European Union has allocated some €2 million ($2.6 million) to four projects benefiting children in some of the most conflict-afflicted countries around the world. The money includes the bloc’s prize money worth 8 million Swedish kroner ($1.2 million).
The money will be used to provide basic education and child-friendly spaces to more than 23,000 children living in camps around the world. It will be coursed through the following nongovernmental organizations and U.N. agencies that have a longstanding partnership with the European Union:
In Iraq, the Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development will work in the Domuz refugee camp to attend to 4,000 Syrian refugee children.
The office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees will assist more than 5,000 Colombian refugee children, most of them currently staying in Ecuador.
Save the Children U.K. will be working with Somali children living in refugee camps in Ethiopia. Its partner, the Norwegian Refugee Council, will concentrate its efforts on displaced children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s North Kivu province.
In Pakistan, UNICEF will provide education packages for displaced children attending camp schools in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The support is under the European Union’s Children for Peace initiative, which EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso said will continue in the years to come.
“I already look forward to next year because this is certainly not a ‘one-off’! We are going to keep this initiative,” he said in a statement Tuesday (Dec. 18). “The Nobel Peace Prize entails a lasting responsibility, and we will therefore continue to fund ‘Children of Peace’ projects every year.”
Almost half of 33.9 million refugees, asylum seekers, stateless people and internally displaced people affected by armed conflict around the world are children, according to UNHCR. Some of the worst hit children come from areas where conflict remains: Syria, Congo, Sudan and the Palestinian territories.
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