The Human Development Report is published by UNDPsince 1990 as independent, empiricallygrounded analyses of major developmentissues, trends and policies.  

This is a report on an educational project delivered to 75 Palestinian and Syrian refugee children, aged 7-12 years, suffering from the acute effects of trauma caused by exposure to severe poverty in therefugee camp of Burj Barajneh in Beirut, Lebanon.   The project provided formal education in a community setting, to enhance the young people’s understanding of key areas of the schools’ curriculum including literacy and numeracy.  The project also provided psychosocial care to help address mental health problems among the child participants caused by the severe social and economic problems in the refugee camp.  This was the first year of a two-year project (2020-2021) jointly managed by the Centre for Global Education (CGE) and the Women’s Program Association, a Palestinian NGO based in Lebanon. 

This report examines the impact of the near decade long war in Syria on Palestinian refugees.  Since 2011, 60 per cent of Palestinian Refugees Syria (PRS) have been displaced at least once, more than 4,000 have been killed and three Palestinian camps in Syria have been destroyed. In the same period, 77,329 Palestinian refugees have been born into highly vulnerable and impoverished communities with the UN reporting 95 per cent of PRS in need of ‘sustained humanitarian assistance’.  29,000 PRS have fled to neighbouring Lebanon where Palestinian Refugees Lebanon (PRL) endure a permanent ‘foreigner’ status without citizenship, property rights and access to nearly 40 occupations.  The report considers the impact of the ongoing Syrian war on PRS and PRL in the context of the current economic upheaval in Lebanon, cuts to the budget of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees and the COVID-19 pandemic.