ECDO is involved in a series of activities to improve the education status of indigenous children. Most of the indigenous children are deprived of the chance to get an education as their guardians see them as an extra hand to work and help them eke out a living. This year ECDO has been involved in two major projects in Education.

Education Materials Distribution Programme:

The Education Material Distribution (EMD) Programme was held on 8th June 2008 at Kushal Patro Indigenous Village, Khadim Nagar, Sylhet. ECDO organizes these programmes yearly from its own fund and this year it went further by adding to the programme of an open discussion with its stakeholders. During the discussion session, ECDO found that 8 indigenous secondary school students had been expelled from school due to not having school dresses. ECDO and the participants then requested the local Union Parishad (UP) Chairman who was present as the Chief Guest of the discussion session to donate school dresses for those kids. The guardians greatly appreciated these efforts made by ECDO and UP Chairman. At the moment, the students are now back to school, just after receiving their uniforms.

Recruitment of Two indigenous teachers at local government Primary School:
With the support of OXFAAM GB, in April 2008 ECDO has recruited two indigenous teachers to teach students in their mother language for the first three years of education. Research has shown that most of the indigenous students struggle with the language barrier as it is their first introduction to Bengali language during their early years of school.

One of the Indigenous commynity teacher is teaching khasi indigenous students with their own mother tongue

This causes mental anguish to the young students as they struggle to keep up with the mainstream students leading to higher drop out rates and low performance. The objective for this project is to overcome this language barrier for the indigenous students and ECDO is establishing this project as a pilot programme and if successful, ECDO’s aim is to appeal to the government to adopt this strategy for all schools with a high number of indigenous students.