Helping Excluded Children Go to School
Education is the most effective tool in the fight to end poverty, and a powerful weapon in the fight against AIDS. Yet, more than 80 million children in the world’s poorest countries – 60% of them girls – are denied a primary education.
The education system in many of the 49 countries where ActionAid works is in a state of crisis. From the perspective of a poor family, investment in education is an expensive and often unrewarding gamble.
It is never easy to send a child to school when that child could instead be playing an important social or economic role, helping the family survive. It becomes even more difficult when you have to pay for your child to go to school. When your child comes home complaining that they were beaten or that no teacher arrived today, it is hard to keep faith in the value of schooling.
When your child is in a class of up to 100 other children, and when, at the end of the year your child is unable to pass the exams you had to pay for, and has to start again from scratch, it is difficult to know whether to blame your child or the school.
When parents are forced to pay up front to gamble on this sort of education, it is no surprise that some refuse. But education is a right – recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And by unlocking other rights, it is the key that enables people to overcome poverty.
ActionAid works at local, national and international levels to secure education rights. We help communities and governments to develop practical, flexible and innovative solutions, and to ensure that schools are places where the right to education is respected.
We work with people to ensure their governments are held accountable at local and national levels to adequately manage and resource basic education, while forming part of an international alliance to hold UN agencies, the World Bank and developed countries accountable for their promises on education funding.
ActionAid on the Ground: Helping Excluded Children Go to School
Children from the poorest families, working children, street children, former child soldiers, and nomadic children are regularly excluded from schools.
Other excluded children are those from minority groups (tribal members, Dalits, low castes or untouchables), children of migrant, landless or pastoralist families, orphans, children affected by HIV & AIDS, those with physical or mental disabilities.
ActionAid's mission involves us positioning ourselves clearly on the side of these children. We work to ensure that these children have equal access to education. The following are just a few examples.
India: children with disabilities
In Tamil Nadu, disabled learners live with their teachers on school premises, follow the same curriculum and evaluation as other students, and have all the facilities to learn in and after school hours. The live-in teachers, known as akkas, are each responsible for a minimum of 5 to 10 disabled students. The akkas facilitate self-learning for the disabled children, as well as habit-formation exercises, painting, music and games.
Ghana: working in remote areas
ActionAid Ghana organized a national camp for girls from very remote areas, emphasizing the importance of girls' education. This gained the support of both the public and the Ministry of Education, and the event has become an annual affair.
Nepal: helping dalit children
ActionAid Nepal was concerned that the children of dalits (so-called untouchables) rarely had access to education. This was difficult to address directly as school teachers and district education offices were seen to share prejudices. The starting point was therefore to work with adult education for dalits, enabling them to analyze the local situation. After a few months they decided to act on the exclusion of their children from local schools. Thousands of dalit women mobilized to protest at the district education offices, demanding that their children be given the same rights of access as other children. This led to a huge wave of new enrolments.
Sierra Leone: child soldiers
Sierra Leone is emerging from a 10-year period of conflict, during which a significant percentage of the population was displaced or became refugees. Thousands of children were separated from their families, abducted or conscripted into the fighting forces, and some were sexually abused and deprived of education and normal psychological development.
The armed conflicts undermined and changed traditional structures and relationships. School facilities were vandalized or completely destroyed and local communities lost any voice in policy-setting and resource allocation. ActionAid is now working closely with the government to ensure this lost generation of children can access education, and the psycho-social needs of traumatized children are addressed.
Join ActionAid and donate now to help children across the world have access to an education.
