Educations Enhancing the Lives of those in Need

Education Brought into the Hands of Jowzjan, Afghanistan

Education: an enlightening experience.

Pitch

"I could not attend school regularly, because I had to take care of my little brothers and sisters in the absence of my parents", replied one of the older girls while working on her colourful and artful dowry. "School was too far away from our home, so that my parents were afraid to let me go there all by myself", said another girl. "My father would not give me the permission to attend school. I come here when he is not at home and without him knowing it", added a third one.

What if every child finished high school, went to college or university, got a job and gave back to their community? In developed countries like Canada, education is often something that people take for granted.  In Canada, going to school is something that happens daily, and so, we have one of the highest literacy rates in the world.  However, we forget that people in other countries do not have access to education like we have in Canada.  Consider children in Afghanistan. Out of 30.4 million people in Afghanistan only 28.1% have even attended a school, never mind graduated high school. 12.6% of these students are female and 43% are male.

By building a student friendly school, we can provide students with a high standard of education and take one small but important step toward children having safe place to boost literacy rates and improve quality of life for them and their families.

The Concept

We encourage Canadians to become directly involved in the reconstruction of Afghanistan. We serve as the connection between Afghan villages and Canadian communities, and aid to hearts and minds in both.

All the work we do in Afghanistan start with the partnerships with the villagers we have developed in the country. We strongly believe that the best way to determine what the villagers need is to ask them. Together we focus on the needs based upon the nature of the impact, number of people affected, and cost. We refer to this as our “wish list” strategy.  Education is the highest priority for both them and us. For all construction projects, local Afghans volunteer to provide the labor and we provide the materials.

The process of collaborating and partnering is valuable. At the end of the day the villagers own the community learning centres  wells, bridges, libraries, irrigation systems and classes, because they are instrumental in conceiving, building, and maintaining them. They move several steps closer to no longer being dependent upon us. This is a goal we all share.

In the city of Jowzjan, one of Afghanistan’s lowest literacy communities, children, teens and adults will be thrilled to attend this school. My research has shown that Afghanistan has a lot of violence due to religious conflict and family conflict. Before beginning the building I would ensure that the church and community associations are in support of sending their children to school during the normal school season and the rainy season (when it is too cold to tend crops). It will provide students from the ages of 6 to 18 the opportunity to attend grades 1-12 safely. Each grade will have their own classroom and one teacher. Since Afghanistan has violence in schools, the building will be equipped with a passcode that only the staff can access to protect all school students and staff.

Many communities do not have heated school facilities to ward against the cold winter weather.  Worse, people often do not attend school because they are afraid of the violence that takes place there.  In 2010 there were 439 teachers, education employees, and students killed in schools in Afghanistan.  In addition, an estimated 40,000 children work in the streets to earn money to meet their basic needs. These factors combined prevent them from getting an education.  (In Afghanistan, children are introduced early to work on the street or in the fields to feed their families instead of attending a school.)  And now, because cell phones have become more prevalent providing information to support agriculture practices and markets, families have come to accept that it is a priority to communicate using written language via text for children. 

Critical Need

This is a global issue… In the past three decades, technology and globalization have reshaped economies around the world. In the process, global labour markets began to take shape bringing tremendous benefits as well as dislocations and challenges. The most striking is the creation of 900 million non-farm jobs in developing countries, helping to take hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.  Still, by 2020 in developing nations there could be about a billion workers who lack secondary education.  Hundreds of millions of working adults without job-relevant skills will need training (half of them with almost no schooling); and capacity of high schools and vocational schools will have to grow at two or three times the current rates. 

With large and fast growing populations, and increasing access to global markets, developing economies became the world’s largest suppliers of low skill labour. The farm to factory transition has played out in places such as Vietnam and the Philippines thanks to relatively high levels of educational attainment.  In the next two decades, the global labour force will grow to over 3.5 billion people.  The implication is that there will be too few workers with advanced skills needed to drive high productivity economies and far too few job opportunities for low skill workers.  Developing economies could have too few medium skill workers to fuel labour intensive sectors and far too many workers who lack the education and training to escape low productivity, low income work.  The most significant imbalances that would arise globally:

-    A potential shortage of about 40 million high skill workers

-    A potential surplus of 90 million low skill workers.

-    A potential shortage of 45 million medium-skill workers in developing countries

Some Afghan Statistics

·      Only 1 in 5 woman can read

·      37% of the total student population is girls, up from Zero during the Taliban regime

·      Only 2 out of every 5 schools are actual buildings.

·      10,000 schools are providing education to 7 million Afghan children

·      The number of teachers in Afghanistan has increased to 142,500  from just over 20,000 in 2010.  Nearly 40,000 of these teachers are women

Impact

In developing economies, the impact of potential imbalances would be felt as inadequate supply of highly educated workers will slow the addition of value-added industries and hinder healthy growth.  Also surplus of low skill workers will trap millions in subsistence agriculture or in urban poverty. 

Reasons to Help Afghanistan

The following facts are important issues to remember as the country continues to realize tangible progress every month. We can help Afghanistan shed these labels.

Unfortunately Distinction	Statistics	Source
World’s Most Dangerous Country	2,412 civilian casualties in 2009	Forbes Magazine (2010)
World’s Highest Maternal Mortality Rate	18,000 deaths/year	UNICEF (2010)
World’s 2nd Worst Place to be Born	n.a.	UNICEF (2009)
World’s Largest Refugee Population	2,887,123 refugees in 2010	UNHCR (2010)
World’s 2nd Least Developed Country	n.a.	United Nations Development Index (2009)
The 4th Most Landmines on Earth	10,000 mines, 10-12 deaths/day	UNICEF (2010)
7th Lowest Life Expectancy on Earth	43.8 years	United Nations Population Division (2010)
World’s 10th Lowest GDP	n.a.	CIA World Factbook (2010)
In the Top 20 of Lowest Human Rights	n.a.	Freedom House (2010)

To create better outcomes for workers, economies, policy makers and business leaders across the world we will need to find ways to provide job relevant education and training. In the western Africa, economies will need to catch up in secondary and agriculture/trade education and find ways to retrain hundreds of millions of adults who have little or no formal education and job skills. This will require new ways of teaching and technologies to extend the capacity of schools and teachers. Even today, in developing countries, low-income students are reached using DVD based lessons and top professors are reaching hundreds of thousands of students per semester rather than hundreds through online systems.

When people see the impact that one school can have on a community, or even a country, they will realize that it is one of the things that are needed everywhere. Afghanistan is seen as a country that is in need of many things. The people that live their have been through so much more than more then half of the population of Canada and we do not realize how much easier our lives are then theirs. The surrounding communities may evolve so that they have a school with as much potential for the community as the one that we will build. This may also push more corporations to put their money to a good cause and help Afghanistan, or countries like it, to grow. 

Feasibility

Timeline

Set Up: 5 month durations beginning on December 31^st 2013

Construction Beginning: June 1^st 2014

Construction Ending: November 20^th 2014

Opening of the School: November 25^th 2014

Cost Category	Cost Description	Expense ($)
Start Up Expenses
	Development	$866/school
	Situational Analysis	$40/school
	Village Feasibility	$43/school
	Community Awareness	$97/school
	Committee Training	$231/school
	Committee materials	$50/school
	Teacher Training
	Curriculum Development	$7/school
	Instructional Materials	$48/school
	Village Literacy Training	$526/school
	Capital Costs	$2497/school
	Infrastructure	$927/school
	Furniture	$339/school
	Equipment	$64/school
	Total	$5,735/school
School Operations
	Teacher salary (cash)	$1350/school/yr
	Teacher salary (in kind)	$960/school/yr
	Manuals	$77/school/yr
	Student books	$790/school/yr
	Consumable Supplies	$280/school/yr
	Student Supplies	$107/school/yr
	Maintenance	$315/school/yr
	Total Operations Costs	$3,879
School Support & Supervision
	Teacher Training	$123/school/yr
	Inspections	$120/school/yr
	Support	$338/school/yr
	Inspection review	$35/school/yr
	Audit	$81/school/yr
	Equipment	$81/school/yr
	Materials	$12/school/yr
	Total Support and Supervision Costs	$770

Sponsors

Beautiful World Canada Foundation 

They are a non-profit organization that is determined to greatly impact the lives of children by encouraging, funding and supporting their education. This program has a mission to help ten million passionate students to excel through high school. Having them help by donating to help with the children in Afghanistan would get them a great amount closer to their goal.

Walmart Community Giving

Walmart has a mission to create opportunities so that people can live better, they do this by providing grants. With the idea of giving people a better life it would be perfect for Walmart to help to build our school. Walmart will also provide volunteers to help to build the school.

Home Depot

Home Depot frequently gives out $5,000 grants to help with renovations and buildings. This money would be put toward the materials to build the building.

Authors Note

You always wonder who is behind the words that you have read, and what brought to strive to complete something so extravagant. My name is Madison Murphy and this issue is one of the things that I have been researching on multiple different occasions for many years. Even though I have been looking at the topic of education in third world countries for sometime now it never struck me until recently that education brings you everything. Without education you could not communicate, get a half decent job, and live the rest of your life with ease. I am a 15 year old girl and I go to Bill Crothers Secondary School, one of the top schools in the province. I play rep volleyball and love to be physically active. I wish to continue to do well in school until university and win the 2014 Volleyball Championships. Providing every one with education means a lot to me because throughout my time researching for this project I have realized how much we take advantage of the things, such as school, which we have in Canada. Without school I would not know most of the things that I know today, and now I cherish these things and I would love to give everyone the chance to do the same.

- Madison Murphy

Sources

"Afghanistan Population Map Statistics Graph Most Populated Cities Density." Afghanistan Population Map Statistics Graph Most Populated Cities Density. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2013.

"Central Intelligence Agency." The World Factbook. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Nov. 2013.

"Education in Afghanistan." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 18 Nov. 2013. Web. 19 Nov. 2013.

Health and Human Resources. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Nov. 2013.

"My School in Afghanistan." Afghan Womens Writing Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2013.