TEHRAN – Contributions of school-building donors have grown well in recent years, which is accelerating the process of school construction, Nasser Ghofli, the director of the School-Building Donors Association, has stated.

Since the establishment of the School-Building Donors Association in 1992, some 150,000 classrooms have been built across the country, he noted.

School-building donors allocated a total of 30 trillion rials (nearly $714 million) to construct educational places nationwide in the last [Iranian calendar] year (March 2020-March 2021), which has doubled this year, and the government increased its share by 330 percent.

"The Iranian School-Building Donors Association is the proudest non-governmental organization in Iran, which has succeeded in building 50 percent of schools for 20 years,” he emphasized.

According to Ghofli, 400 school-building charities have been registered in the country so far.

Mehrollah Rakhshanimehr, director of the Organization for Development, Renovation, and Equipping, 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.

In line with the education reform plan, people who have a popular reputation are being invited as ambassadors to attract public participation for school construction even by buying a brick.

Iran has many school-building benefactors amounting to 650,000 people inside and 1,000 people outside the country.

There are some 107,000 schools nationwide with 530,000 classes, 160,000 of which are dilapidated, not meeting safety standards. Some 30 percent of the schools nationwide are old, of which some 12 percent must be completely rebuilt and 18 percent must be retrofitted.

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