Over 40 Nobel Prize laureates call upon planet’s richest people to provide shelter and food to refugee children

A letter written by 46 Nobel Prize laureates, in which they call upon the planet’s richest to help refugee children, was unveiled during the Nobel Prize Teacher Summit in Stockholm on Thursday. Russian journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov was the one to speak on behalf of the signees.

He said that fundraising would be organised by UNICEF, with the plan to collect $100 million before the end of the year. That money would be enough to make sure that 500,000 children will “have food, light, and shelter for the New Year”, according to the letter.

Speaking to the teachers, Muratov said that “war is the destruction of teachers’ work”, as their students “come back in coffins”.

The letter states that 262 million people are currently starving: this number has increased by 9 million since the start of the war in Ukraine.

“What can we do? We can help those who are worse off than we are,” the document says.

Among the signees are Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich, Russian-British physicist Konstantin Novoselov, American physicist Steven Chu, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, American economist Paul Milgrom, Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman, American chemist Roald Hoffmann, Iranian human rights defender Shirin Ebadi, Japanese scientist Hiroshi Amano, American virologist Harvey J. Alter, and others.

In June 2022, Muratov sold his Nobel Medal for $103.5 million to raise money for child refugees and their families.