Jordan

Since the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, more than 660,000 Syrians have taken refuge in Jordan.  Over a third of these refugees are school-aged children.  The vast majority of this refugee population live in cities and urban areas, while 20% of the population take shelter in camps.  Their arrival has put extreme pressure on Jordanian public services, particularly in education.  The most inhabited regions, located in the North, were forced to implement a “double-session” school system in order to accommodate the rising number of students.  Integration of Syrian refugees has also become a great problem within Jordanian communities.

Since 2015, Libraries Without Borders has worked with other international organisations and local Jordanian authorities to implement an Ideas Box in a variety of locations.  BSF has also simultaneously worked to adapt the Ideas Box to the linguistic and cultural needs of refugee and host populations.  The first Ideas Box was deployed in April of 2015 in the Azraq refugee camp, setting up psychosocial activities proposed by the CARE association.  In October of 2016, antoher Ideas Box was deployed in the Zaatari refugee camp, in the learning center of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).  These projects have inspired LWB to develop new, ambitious projects throughout 2017.

In 2017, LWB and CARE worked with the Wameed association to organize a “hip-hop workshop” in a compartment of the Ideas Box.  As a result, about thirty boys and girls learned how to produce their very own hip hop projects (texts, music, videos).  BSF also recently partnered with the Danish Refugee Council, an NGO, to deploy an IdeasBox in the community center of al-Nuzha, located in the Amman suburb.  The goal of this IdeasBox was to support psychosocial and educational activities, as well as activities that help improve technical and linguistic skills.

In 2017, with the support of the Amman Children’s Museum, LWB designed its first IdeasBox project.  The Ideas Box mobile will take part on a national tour of museums, promoting education in the most remote parts of the country.