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March 20th, 2021 ― Doha: In partnership with Yemen Red Crescent Society (YRCS) and Yemen’s Ministry of Education, Qatar Red Crescent Society (QRCS) started distributing winterization kits to school students.
Under the 2021 Warm Winter project in Yemen, a total of 18,000 are being distributed to the children of poor and displaced families in five governorates.
Each winterization kit contains a warm coat, shoes, three pairs of socks, wool jacket, wool gloves, and jeans trousers of multi-sizes to fit the 7-10-year-olds of Grades 1-3 at the public basic education schools of Amanat Al-Asimah, Sanaa, Dhamar, Amran, and Sa'dah.
During the distribution at a school of Yafaa, a village in Dhamar, the headteacher Ahmed Al-Zaabali thanked QRCS and YRCS for reaching out to such remote and hard-to-access areas. He commended the good contributions that brought happiness to the faces of young children.
According to Mr. Al-Zaabali, the families there face severe living conditions due to the war and blockade. The too cold weather in the winter caused a wide spread of common cold, pneumonia, and rheumatism among the kids. He described the project as addressing the needs of such an age group and called for an expansion of the project to include more beneficiaries.
Mohamed Al-Jabri, the project’s coordinator, stated, “I saw the smiles of children at schools and special education institutions as they received their new winter clothes. Many parents said that having these clothes for their children would greatly protect them against many winter-associated diseases. Most of them cannot afford to buy warm clothes for their kids in the currently difficult situation”.
The directors, teachers, and staff of schools expect the new supplies to motivate the students to attend school regularly and study well. Also, these clothes would help to reduce morbidity, particularly among the young kids.
Other outcomes of the project include reducing absenteeism and ease the burden of providing medications for flue, cough, and other common winter illnesses. The recipients wished that the project would continue to cover all the students and children with special needs in the target most underserved areas.
The project is part of QRCS’s Warm Winter project, which is planned to provide shelter and food assistance for a total of 84,711 beneficiaries, at an overall cost of $995,264.