Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - Minister of planning and International Cooperation Imad Fakhoury signed with the United Nations Children's Fund UNICEF Jordan Representative Robert Jenkins, three JD3 million protocols to aid Syrian refugee host communities and minimize the impact of hosting the displaced people.

The First protocol offers the sum of JD1,354,709 as a grant to the Ministry of Education to help it bear the burden of accepting Syrian refugee students in the second semester of the 2014/2015 scholastic year and the first semester of the 2015/2016 academic year, both inside and outside the refugee camps. It assists the ministry in providing formal and alternative education by means of holding training courses, paying teachers' salaries for supervision of tests, maintaining of ministry schools, equipping schools in the Zatari Refugee Camp, improving and expanding the schools' water and sanitary facilities and supporting irregular education for dropout children.

The second protocol, amounting to the value of JD1,062,000, is to support the Ministry of Health to reduce child mortality rates, with emphasis on neonatal health, through holding training courses and workshops in neonatal healthcare, evaluating 12 public and private hospitals according to the UNICEF's child-friendly hospital initiative, employing consultant experts to boost the health ministry's data system management, provide medical appliances, such as muscles, cold chains, child feeding appliances and setting up and supplementing a digital system of the Expanded Program on Immunization- Data Management System.

The third protocol, at the sum of JD531,835, aims to support the security sector in order to be child- and gender-friendly through the management of family protection and juvenile police. The protocol includes a number of activities, including holding training courses and workshops in the field of family protection, creating new branches of the family protection and juvenile police administration in a number of governorates in the Kingdom as well as a branch at Al Azraq Refugee Camp.

The protocols are in line with the 2015 Jordan Response Plan (JRP) on supporting refugee host communities within the education, protection and health sectors and the ministry's efforts to secure the necessary support for the JRP.