TEHRAN (Iran News) – Philanthropists donate $1.4b to construct schools nationwide. School building benefactors have allocated a total of 60 trillion rials (nearly $1.4 billion at the official rate of 42,000 rials) to construct educational spaces over the past four years, IRNA reported on Wednesday.
Over the past year (March 2020-March 2021), some 50 percent of the country’s schools have been constructed either entirely charitable or in partnership with the government and charities, Mehrollah Rakhshanimehr, director of the Organization for Development, Renovation, and Equipping Schools, has said.
Over the past year, a sum of 30 trillion rials (about $700 million at the official rate of 42,000 rials) has been allocated to school construction and renovation by the benefactors, he explained.
“Brick-by-brick” national plan has so far collected 80 billion rials (about $2 million at the official rate of 42,000 rials), Rakhshanimehr further stated.
The plan started early last year and was highly welcome by benevolent people, aiming to encourage people to donate money for building schools in deprived areas of the country, he added.
Rakhshanimehr said in August 2020 that some 30 percent of the country’s schools have been constructed by school-building benefactors; there are 450 school-building charities in Iran.
Iran has many school-building benefactors amounting to 650,000 people inside and 1,000 people outside the country.
A total of 36 trillion rials (nearly $857 million at the official rate of 42,000 rials) has been allocated to renovate the schools nationwide over the past 8 years, Seyed Mohammad-Ali Afshani, former head of the Organization for Development, Renovation, and Equipping Schools, said on Saturday.
There are some 107,000 schools nationwide with 530,000 classes, 160,000 of which are dilapidated, not meeting safety standards, accounting for 30 percent of the schools nationwide.
