Spreading education

Asia/ Pakistan/ 30.09.2019/ Fuente: www.verdict.co.uk.

En Pakistan, 51% of people are expected to own smartphones by 2020, but 48% of children cannot read a simple sentence by the time they leave primary education. To bridge this divide, Haroon Yasin set up the Orenda Project to teach the national curriculum using digital learning. Verdict talked to him about how Orenda’s Taleemabad app is bringing education to children overlooked by traditional schooling.

Haroon Yasin grew up in a middle-class family in Islamabad but saw incredible disparity with poor areas on his doorstep devoid of any basic services. When he dropped out of college – though he did eventually graduate from Georgetown University in a different discipline – he got to know the children living in the slums where they started working at the age of four, picking up trash on the streets and chronically malnourished.

“I became consumed with wanting to do something for them,” he says. “I rented a two-room building and opening a day-care centre because all I wanted was for these really young kids to be off the street.”

Yasin’s team found that one of the best ways to keep them engaged and happy was to teach them in a way that they enjoyed, so they inadvertently became teachers. As they themselves had hated formal education as students, it gave them insight into what needed to be done to fix it.

“That school in the slum flourished and had 100 kids in the school at one point. We used to feed them and teach them a lot of different skills,” Yasin says.

“We started thinking about the fact that they were about 24 million of these [out of school] kids all across our country. We started travelling all around crisscrossing to small villages and towns, where it was almost impossible to get to by car or a motorbike, and we had to go down a track or take a bull cart to those places.”

Identifying the problem

Yasin would stay in the villages helping the farmers in the field and spending time with communities to really get to the heart of why, even where there was a free educational opportunity, most students were choosing to forego that.

“I was farming with this particular farmer and I became frustrated with the whole thing and said, look, why don’t you send your kids to school? It’s right there and it’s free. And he became really cross with me and said why should I send my kid to school?” says Yasin.

“He had two children and sent one of them to school while the other stayed in the fields. The one that had gone to school had eventually grown weak because he would be indoors all day studying and got glasses, which was a bit of a stigma for the people in the village because they’re, like, he has a disability now.

“Eventually, even after completing 10 years of education, he didn’t get a job. And so he came back to the village, not strong enough to do any work in the fields, not educated enough to be employed in a high-rise office.”

Yasin believes that farmer’s generation was failed when Pakistan established its public education system, and that failure has been repeated across the world. He also noted an unusual disparity; in Pakistan, 50% of the children grow up chronically malnourished, and many are taken out of school because they have to work long days.

But even among the poorest children he taught, their parents found the resources to somehow buy mobile phones as they are so essential to modern life. Even in areas with no electricity supply, they would bring phones to the local mosque to charge as there was always a small generator there.

Fuente de la noticia: https://www.verdict.co.uk/taleemabad-app-orenda/