An eleventh-grade Palestinian schoolgirl has won the local chapter of the UAE-backed Arab Reading Challenge.

Afaf Sharif, who studies at a girls’ school in Ramallah, was honoured at a ceremony in Bethlehem along with nine other student finalists.

She had come out on top of hundreds of thousands of students across 16 Arab countries who had each read dozens of books — in the hope of taking home a Dh550,000 prize.

She now joins an elite group of the competition’s top 400 participants to make it to the final stages.

At the ceremony, education minister Sabri Saidam said that “unique and difficult circumstances” experienced in Palestine had not stopped students taking part in the competition.

“These difficulties did not discourage our youth, but rather fuelled their desire to read and learn in order to be able to improve their lives and give back to their homeland,” he added.

The competition’s secretary-general, Najla Al Shamsi, lauded Palestinian students for their “tremendous effort to learn [and] transforming suffering to hope and challenges to opportunities”.

A supervisor for the competition, Hamid Amo Makho, and the best school, the Araba Girls Elementary School, were also awarded.

More than 210,000 students from various grades across 16 Arab countries made it to the second phase of the Arab Reading Challenge.

The pan-Arab competition’s rules state that each school-aged participant must read at least 50 books, all of them in Arabic.

Each participant is then judged for their knowledge of the books they have read. Finalists across the region will compete for ultimate honours at the grand finale to be hosted in Dubai in October 2017.

The Arab Reading Challenge was launched in the UAE in 2015, and is now in its second edition. The project hopes to instigate a cultural renaissance in the Arab world by encouraging students to read more.

source: GULF NEWS