More than 650 young men and women completed accelerated technical and vocational courses sponsored by Rene Mouwad Foundation (RMF) within the ‘Youth support through education, capacity building and employment in the North’ project funded by UNICEF. In the graduation ceremony held in Kfarzina-Zgharta, RMF executive director, Michel Mouawad, stressed the importance of the project which extends opportunities to the youth assuring them that they can dream big and realize their aspirations through hard work and knowledge. Mouawad thanked the UN agency for allocating more than USD one million for the program. Mouawad drew attention to the extent of dereliction on part of the State, especially with relation to the huge numbers of school dropouts as a result of the stressful social and economic conditions and the crisis of Syrian displacement. “We must all work hard to help as much we can in order to curtail this phenomenon,” Mouawad maintained. At the end of the ceremony, the beneficiaries received their certificates along with a set of tools to facilitate their access to the labor market. To note, some 2277 young men and women aged between 14 and 24 years within Minyeh, Diniyeh, Zgharta and Tripoli benefited from the project. (Al Mustaqbal, January 29, 2018)