Education

The Needs

 

758 million adults, two-thirds of whom are women, remain illiterate*, while an estimated 57 million children of primary school age are being denied their right to education** due to disasters, disease, distance and poverty. Even for children who have a desire to learn, having to take long and dangerous journeys to school are a huge deterrent to attending school regularly or at all.

For those who do make it to school, the low quality of education means that they are not able to be nurtured to their fullest potential. This leads to high repetition and school drop-out rates.

*United Nations, 2016
**United Nations, 2013

Most children in Africa have never owned a book of their own.

Cleopatra, or better known as Cleo by her friends, is 8-years-old and lives in Zambia. She knows that education is a “good thing” as everyone says, but there is no way she could get educated because her village never had a school.

“There is a school in the next village but there are lions and other wild animals in the area. Trying to access education meant that children have to walk about 24 kilometres crossing streams,” says the village headman, Safi.

“In the process, some children drowned to death while crossing the streams. Allowing their children to go to school has become a life and death decision,” adds Safi. “Most parents in this village would never allow their precious children to risk their lives for an education in this way.”

Thankfully, two youths from another district came to Cleo's area offering to hold classes under the trees for children in her village. These two youths, even though they are untrained teachers, greatly inspired Cleo. “I want to finish school and become a teacher,”she says with conviction. “I like the way teachers teach and give knowledge to us children.”

Cleo’s dream of wanting to become a teacher is an extraordinary overture given that her village has no known educated individual.

However, Cleo struggles to learn how to read, write or count as the two youths have little resources to teach them the little that they know. It is common for these village schools to have over 100 students per “classroom” all sharing three books.

“We sit on planks that are put on blocks. The seats are not stable, they shake and we do not even write well,” says Cleo, a World Vision sponsored child. One of the teachers discloses that under-tree classes are prone to disturbances as children cannot concentrate whenever there is a simple distraction including people passing by.

Safi says his community has lagged behind because of not having educated individuals. We want children to be educated so that they bring development. We know that in education, there is development,” he says.

Globally, two-thirds of children – or 262 million – are in school and will reach the last grade of primary school but will not achieve minimum proficiency levels in reading. About 60% or 137 million adolescents are in school but not learning.

(Source: UNESCO, 2017)

Key Challenges

Inaccessibility of Schools

In order to reach the nearest school, children in rural areas walk as long as two hours under dangerous conditions such as mountainous terrain that gets slippery when it rains, or forests where they might get abducted.

Run-Down Infrastructure

Rural schools are often poorly maintained, which means that roofs leak when it rains, classrooms are dark and toilet conditions are unsanitary. There are also insufficient tables and chairs for students to use when writing.

Poor Quality of Education

Traditional teaching methods like rote learning are ineffective in delivering learning objectives and student engagement levels are low. Teachers in rural areas lack training in better pedagogy.

Economic Poverty

It is hard for poor families to prioritise education when they are struggling to meet their daily needs. Parents would rather have their children work to supplement family income, but this traps children in low wage and unskilled jobs in the future.

Gender Discrimination

53 percent of primary school age children who cannot go to school are girls. They are at a disadvantage as cultural norms often dictate that they should stay home and help with household chores.

How We Help

Our experience has shown that families, schools, communities, and governments must work together to help children develop skills in and out of school, from early childhood through adolescence.

“Educated for Life” is the approach at the heart of World Vision’s education strategy. Here are the project models we have developed according to age group:

Early Childhood Development (ages 0–6)

The early years are critical. Our Early Childhood Development (ECD) programming focuses on the pre-primary years to ensure children form a strong foundation for early learning in a secure and stimulating environment.

  • Learning Roots focuses on the developmental needs of children aged 3-6. It engages parents to support early reading and numeracy skills; strengthens systems by working with national policies; fosters community links with the formal sector; and works to strengthen early childhood development centres.

Primary School (ages 6–12)

Attaining the basic skills of literacy and numeracy is the main focus for children in primary level education, with a goal of increasing the number of children who read with comprehension.

  • The global literacy programme known as Unlock Literacy is designed to improve reading outcomes. Teachers are trained to incorporate the five core reading skills into their curricula and parents learn to help their children read outside of school. The programme is now reaching about 1.7 million children.

Adolescents (ages 12–18)

World Vision is also preparing adolescents for work and a productive adulthood by helping them develop vital skills that will help them pursue their educational and life goals.

  • Through our Safe and Nurturing Schools programme, we help create a positive school environment free from physical punishment, bullying, and sexual violence. We also help develop codes of conduct for appropriate teacher and student behaviour.
  • Through our Girl VISION programme, we prepare girls to transition to and complete secondary school by addressing the key barriers they face. This involves changing attitudes, engaging the girls themselves, and working across sectors such as health and child protection, and at the family, community, school, and government levels.

World Vision also provides a child-friendly learning environment for children to encourage a love of learning and to lower school drop out rates.

  • We build and refurbish rural schools to ensure children have a clean and bright classroom with proper desks and chairs.
  • We build libraries and ensure that classrooms are full of child-friendly reading materials to aid learning.
  • We also to ensure children have the right resources for a quality education. In Ethiopia, solar lamps are provided to brighten up the dark mud huts that children attend their reading camps in. In Vietnam, children are provided with bicycles so they do not have to spend a long time walking to their school far away.

Our Impact

Exciba's Story
(Click to read)

13-year-old Exciba would never have dreamt of doing well in her studies or attending a ‘good’ school. But here she was ranking top 10 in her first year attending a National School.

“I studied only up to grade 6, and no one from our community completed school. I didn’t think schools even accepted children from communities like ours,” says Sasikumari, Exciba’s mother.

Exciba and her family come from a community that work as labourers on a tea estate in Sri Lanka where they pluck tea and work in the tea factory for a low wage. Living in seclusion on the tea estate in one-room houses provided by the tea estate owners, parents do not recognise the value of an education as they felt that their children had their future carved out for them in the tea factory anyway.

Most formal schools did not accept children from these communities because of their low literacy rates and their high tendency to drop out of school.

However, in 2013, World Vision introduced a literacy programme in the community where children could learn to read and write in a learning space while their parents were at work. World Vision also held awareness programmes for the parents and the tea estate management on the importance of educating the children.

Within three years of the programme, Exciba not only started to excel in her studies, she also scored very well at the enrolment exam for the National School in her area. “I want to become a teacher one day and teach children in my community to read and write,” she says.

Since the start of the literacy programme, several more children are now enrolled into regular school. Older children who joined the programme have been able to find better employment in the town.

 

Vietnam ImpactNepal ImpactSri Lanka Impact

To read our latest report on our education projects, click here

 

How You Can Help

Donate to the General Education Fund

Donate

Buy Gifts to Nurture Bright Minds

View Gifts

Bring Sustained Hope and Help, One Child at a Time

Sponsor a child