One of the key issues in Bangladesh is that children from poor and marginalised families tend to drop out of school at an early age. During the idea generation stage of our second Community Action Day (CAD), we had a meeting with the local youth club members to ask them about some of the issues in their community that they wanted to address. Some of the concerns raised were early child marriage and disregard towards education by some families. We then decided it would be a good idea to do our second CAD for local BRAC school children and their families to make them aware of the importance of education. We wanted to organise an event which would encourage the young children to continue their education through to high school and beyond. We also wanted to make the children and their guardians aware of the alternative careers and opportunities that would be made possible through continued education.
During the planning stage of our second CAD ‘Education is the path to success’, we had a meeting with the manager of the local BRAC education programme to propose our plans. BRAC is an NGO and one of their endeavours is to provide free primary school education to underprivileged children living in rural areas not serviced by state schools. The local manager also shared with us some statistics from the local high school to highlight some of the key reasons why children leave school prematurely. She told us that in 2014, 28 BRAC primary school graduates from the local area she was overseeing were admitted into high school. She also gave a startling statistic that within 2 years, 14 of those 28 students (50%) had dropped out. Following this high drop out rate, BRAC launched an investigation to the find out the reasons. Of those 14 children that dropped out, 7 of them were girls who dropped out due to early marriage. The other 7 were boys who dropped out to work in tailoring, jute mills and garment factories.
Therefore, it was important that we drew attention to these issues with our CAD and overall, our CAD event was a success. All of the invited BRAC schools attended our event. The turn out from guardians exceeded our expectations and it was the first time the auditorium had been at full capacity. Guardians were present throughout the event which meant that our message on the importance of continued education for children was being heard by key influencers of these children’s lives.
The following is my article on Community Action Day 2 for the second newsletter of NW Bangladesh cycle 2.
On 3rd March 2015, VSO ICSE NW Bangladesh team hosted their second Community Action Day which was the best one yet. VSO volunteers collaborated with local youth club members to come up with the idea of working with the four local BRAC schools which provide free education for children from low income families. We invited the young BRAC students, their guardians and teachers to the Begum Rokeya Complex in Pairabond for our planned event. The theme of our event was ‘Education is the path to success’ and the idea was to make our audience aware that if the young children stay in education, they will have a brighter future with better earning potential to provide for their families. We also wanted to inform guardians about the problem with young children dropping out of school early. We highlighted how it will hinder their future careers and the disadvantages of early marriage, especially for girls.
We had several activities planned for our event which ran from 9 am to 12 pm. We invited guest speakers to give speeches about the importance of education and continued education for young children. VSO UK ‘bideshi’ volunteers then performed a drama with dialogues in Bangla about a family scenario which highlighted the issues around early marriage and the importance of education for development. The young audience were delighted and had plenty of laughter, especially at some of the UK volunteer’s Bangla pronunciations and accents. The drama ended with a message in Bangla which read, ‘Education is the key to development.’ A drawing activity session was then conducted with the children. Colour pencils and paper were provided and children were encouraged to draw pictures of what they wanted to be when they grew up. Most of them ended up drawing pictures of houses and Bangladeshi flags but it was nice to see the kids express themselves and have some fun.
Our final activity and the most gratifying part of the day was when we handed out gifts to the children. Each of the 157 BRAC school children received gifts which included a word book, note books, a pen, a pencil, a rubber, a sharpener and a pencil box. Youth club members also handed out snack bags to the children. It was heart warming to see the smiles on the young faces as they received their gifts, some even offered their little hands for a handshake before we even had a chance to offer ours.
On the whole, the day was very successful. We recorded a total number of 331 attendees, of which 164 were children and 167 were adults. The turnout was so good that we needed extra chairs to accommodate everyone in the auditorium. We even received press coverage about our event through an article published in a national newspaper. This helped to spread our message further afield about the importance of young children staying in education. We look forward to hosting our third CAD which we hope will be just as successful as our second, if not more!
danielfoo 