06/08/2003

UN pledges 66 million textbooks for Iraqi schools

Some 5.5 million Iraqi students and 25,000 teacher trainees will receive textbooks for the next academic year under a funding agreement approved by the UN.

The project, worth $72.3 million in all, aims to print more than 66 million copies of newly edited textbooks for nationwide distribution for the 2003-2004 academic year. Most existing textbooks were looted or burned after the war, and adding to the challenge was a decision to edit out propagandist statements from the texts without changing the educational content. Some 509 titles are up for replacement.

Also approved this week were a $104 million project for fertilizer for Iraq's winter wheat and barley crops, and $6.8 million for fungicides to contain smut - a disease that affects wheat and barley seeds.

Meanwhile, the acting governor of the Central Bank of Iraq, Faleh Dawod Salman, has sent a letter to the Security Council urging Member States to transfer all frozen Iraqi assets to the Development Fund for Iraq account that has been established at the US Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

In northern Iraq, UNHCR has begun a shelter programme to help displaced people who had returned to their original villages rebuild houses destroyed during the previous government's campaign against Iraqi Kurds.

(GMcG)

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