Indeed, I think the impact on children has been tremendous and is really a tragedy. I'll just quote some numbers.
Eleven thousand children have been reported as killed. These are identified children. These are children who have been killed by explosive devices and by weapons.
Five thousand of 22,000 schools in Syria are closed or damaged. Refugees leaving Syria have a challenge to access education, as you rightly point out, and 1.9 million of the 5.4 million children in Syria are out of school.
As you've suggested, there is a real possibility of a lost generation here. We're really concerned about that from the programming side, because we want to make sure our programming actually targets the special needs of this generation. We do that through a variety of approaches.
What we look for in our programming are organizations like UNICEF and Save the Children, which have a special mandate for that response and look at education as one element of the response, but also look at psychological counselling and support for unaccompanied children. As I mentioned, the number of unaccompanied children is quite large. We look to organizations that have these kinds of mandates and can put in place the psychological and medical services, and so on, the whole package of services that we would expect in Canada when we're dealing with children who are traumatized by violence, and so on.
There has been a study and there's an initiative under way right now by UNICEF that we're really following closely. We are speaking to them on a regular basis to try to understand how we can actually expand and respond to this lost generation issue. UNICEF has come out with a strategy that looks at the regional response and the regional issue and is trying to identify all the intervention points, be it education, be it medical services, and so on, that would allow the international community to come together and respond.
A lot of this, as I've mentioned, and as you've asked about, is in the region, as well as in Syria. In the region, much of the effort is being managed by UNHCR, which is the agency responsible for dealing with a refugee crisis. They of course are working with a range of actors, as well as the governments that are there. I should mention that they have been tremendously generous in their support and have been opening up their schools to children in the region, but of course they were already hard-pressed to respond to the needs of their own citizens, and to have this added pressure has certainly challenged them.
I think this UNICEF initiative that's looking at the lost generation and is coming up with quite a comprehensive plan is something that we're going to look at very closely. As we go forward in the coming weeks, that's how we're going to try to determine how to calibrate our response.