Education
To ensure education for all indigenous people is central to achieving the objectives of ECDO. Considering this, ECDO has two components in its education program: Education Materials Distribution and Education Support Centers. In addition, ECDO conducts some local advocacy work towards this.
Education Materials Distribution (EMD)
Most of the indigenous people have very little cash and live below the poverty line. ECDO’s research identified the lack of basic educative tools, such as pens and paper as one of the chief contributors to the high drop-out rate of children in primary education. Since 2004 ECDO has been providing free educational materials for the poorest indigenous children to enable them to continue their education. This program serves over 300 children across four indigenous communities.
Education Support Center (ESC)
What is an Education Support Center?
ECDO’s education activities originally focused on free Educational Materials Distribution for a period of three years. The objective of the program was to increase attendance rates and the number of children completing primary level education.
However, the output of the program had only achieved a small proportion of its objectives. Monitoring and learning from this program found that free educational materials did not solve the inherent problems in education. One of the main problems was a lack of motivation and literacy of guardians which meant that children were not encouraged to attend school or able to gain help in completing their homework at home. When homework was not completed, they were often subjected to corporal punishment in school. To compound this problem, teaching was delivered in Bangla, which is not the mother tongue for most indigenous children.
All of these factors acted as a deterrent for indigenous school children to regular attendance in the local primary school. As a result of this discovery, ECDO has taken a new initiative to remove these problems for the indigenous community students.
Since January 2006, ECDO has implemented a pilot project of four Education Support Centers (ESC) into two Khasi Punjee (Mokam Punjee, Jaintapur, Sylhet). The pilot project was developed following numerous Focus Group Discussions and meetings with community members, using a participatory approach to design a strategy to deal with education problems. The Support Centre is open from 7am- 9am every day (except weekend day) to help children complete their homework. It is run by a locally recruited teacher.
The ESC is supported by a Committee composed of local community leaders and members who oversee the running of the center and have monthly meetings with ECDO’s Education Organizer to monitor and evaluate the ESC.
Achievements of Education Support Centers
Through this model of Education Support Centers, ECDO has increased the attendance rate among the indigenous children. Mr Mosharraf Hossain, Upazella education officer of Goainghat Upazella, Sylhet visited this program and he was very impressed with ECDO’s unique model. A feature has since been published in Prothom Alo, a Bangladesh’s leading daily national newspaper on the success of the ESC program.
Currently 135 children attend four ESCs. Their capacity is for thirty students, but due to their success they are heavily oversubscribed. ECDO is trying to expand the program and is searching for funding to enable them to do this. If you are interested in finding out how you may be able to support ECDO’s education work, please contact ECDO.
Education Advocacy
ECDO also organizes guardians’ meetings to raise awareness of the importance of education, and advocate that they keep their children in school. To partner this, ECDO has been lobbying the local government to recruit indigenous teachers for the schools in indigenous areas, as the indigenous children suffer from a lack of Bangla comprehension as lessons are not being taught in their mother tongue. In 2006 ECDO succeeded in ensuring the recruitment of a female indigenous teacher at Mokampunjee Registered primary school, Jaintapur, Sylhet, with the support of local indigenous people.