Bana Alabed – Education Initiative

Bana Alabed was born in Aleppo in 2009. In 2016, as Eastern Aleppo came under siege, she was seven years old. From inside a city under bombardment, with the help of her mother Fatemah, she began sharing messages on Twitter, describing what she and her family were living through, appealing to the world to notice, and refusing to let the children of Aleppo disappear from sight. Her words and her courage reached millions of people worldwide and helped bring unprecedented international attention to the crisis unfolding in Syria’s streets.

After being evacuated in December 2016, Bana and her family resettled and rebuilt their lives. She later wrote Dear World: A Syrian Girl’s Story of War and Plea for Peace, bringing her testimony to readers around the world and continuing to amplify the voices of children living through conflict. She has since become one of the most recognised young advocates for children’s right to safety, peace, and education.

In 2025, Bana received the International Children’s Peace Prize, a recognition of her extraordinary courage as a child bearing witness to the siege of Aleppo, and of her ongoing advocacy for children’s rights to education, safety and peace. The prize has given her a platform and resources to act on those values directly.

Eastern Aleppo was among the most heavily damaged urban areas of the Syrian war. Its schools were shelled, looted, and stripped of the most basic equipment. Years after the ceasefire, classrooms in the area remain largely bare with children sitting on floors or sharing whatever broken furniture remains, in conditions that make concentrated learning almost impossible. For Bana, who grew up in these streets and knows what was taken from the children who stayed, this project is deeply personal.

The Bana Alabed Education Initiative will procure 90 school desks – sourced locally to support the Syrian economy and ensure rapid delivery – for distribution across ten classrooms in Eastern Aleppo. Three hundred children will benefit directly, supported by five to ten teachers. Every pound raised flows to physical materials: desks, transport, and the infrastructure needed to get them into the schools where they are needed most.

The project is modest in scale and precise in purpose. Bana’s intention is that this project marks the beginning of a longer commitment, returning to Aleppo and building on what is achieved here to reach more children in the years ahead.

Key Moment from the Project

For Bana Alabed, this project begins where her story started. She was seven years old when she sent her first message from a besieged city, asking the world to see the children living through war. The world did see – and now, as a 2025 International Children’s Peace Prize laureate, she is using the platform and resources that recognition has given her to go back. Not with words this time, but with desks. Returning to the schools of Eastern Aleppo and putting furniture in classrooms where children have been sitting on floors since the ceasefire is, for Bana, a way of honouring everything the children who remained endured, and a statement that rebuilding a childhood is as urgent and concrete as rebuilding a building.