World Education: Breaking the Cycle of Child Labor- Sharadha's Story

Sharadha's Story

To support her family, Sharadha, a young girl from Nepal, was forced to drop out of school. Instead of learning, she worked 12 hours a day in the same brick factory where her mother died. 

Poor girls in Nepal are especially vulnerable to trafficking and exploitative labor, including dangerous work in Nepal’s many brick factories. Children (and adults) who work in brick factories are exposed to lung-damaging levels of dust, extreme heat from kilns that fire bricks, and health problems stemming from extreme physical labor combined with poor diets. Furthermore, if they attend school at all, children who work in brick factories show poor academic performance and are often absent from school, which results in some of the lowest learning outcomes in the country.

To address these challenges, World Education uses a holistic approach to reach at-risk youth with basic education through several interventions, including coaching and mentoring in addition to scholarships for girls/children, nonformal education classes, and working with the Nepali government to strengthen local schools. At the same time, World Education works with the government to monitor factories for child labor abuses.

World Education’s Building Better Futures program enrolled Sharadha in a nonformal education class targeting children who are forced to work in the brick industry, and helped Sharadha transition back to formal school. Beyond basic education, World Education empowers children like Sharadha with tools and life skills to identify and avoid exploitative labor. 

Today, Sharadha is a bright and motivated seventh-grade student living in the Sarlahi district of Nepal. She plans to become a nurse so she can help people in her community. 

Sharadha is among thousands of children forced to endure life-threatening working conditions to support their families. In 2017, World Education and its partners supported the education of roughly 1,000 children in the brick factories, and helped more than 100 former child laborers like Sharadha re-enroll in school in Nepal. 

Learn more about World Education's work for girls' like Sharadha. 

Teach for All: Strengthening the Global Education Ecosystem to foster Education For All

On April 20, 2017, Teach For All and the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution co-hosted a roundtable following the recommendation included in the Education Commission’s Learning Generation report, which calls for more concerted support and investment in a global education ecosystem. The roundtable gathered over 40 experts from global civil society organizations, social enterprises, bilateral and multilateral organizations, corporations, global philanthropies, research organizations, and think tanks, including Daniel Stoner, Co-Chair of the Basic Education Coalition and Associate Vice President for Education and Child Protection, Save the Children and Suezan Lee, Education Finance Specialist, USAID, in Washington D.C..

During the discussion, participants explored how a global ecosystem has led change in the health sector, discussed key opportunities and challenges for global education, and collectively identified actions to move the Learning Generation report recommendation forward. Participants agreed to:

1. Create a shared understanding of what we mean by a global education ecosystem—what its characteristics are and why is it important; 
2. Discuss what is needed to help strengthen it—where are the gaps and opportunities, and in particular, what key global public goods help to facilitate cross-border learning and capacity building of local stakeholders; and 
3. Identify initial next steps that we might take collectively to help increase support for and investments in the development of global public goods, including an infrastructure for fostering local capacity to adapt, learn, and share.

Experts are hoping to convene again in September around the 72nd session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York and in November at the The WISE Summit in Doha.

Teach For All alongside many other global education stakeholders looks forward to continuing to collaborate on these actions as the global education sector works toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 4 of ensuring inclusive and quality education for all by 2030. With this strengthened foundation, we hope that collectively we can advocate for increased investment in education, allocate funding more efficiently, and create an environment that encourages sharing best practices across borders. 

Teach For All is a global network of 45 independent, locally led and governed partner organizations and a global organization that works to accelerate the progress of the network. Each network partner recruits and develops promising future leaders to teach in their nations’ high-need schools and communities and, with this foundation, to work with others, inside and outside of education, to ensure all children are able to fulfill their potential. 

Teach For All network partners currently have over 14,000 placed teachers in low-income communities across 45 countries, and 65% of its more than 55,000 alumni are working in education or with disadvantaged communities.

Save the Children: Transforming Health and Education in Guatemala’s Western Highlands

In August 2016, I had the privilege of visiting Save the Children’s IDEA project in Guatemala with Jonathan Cordone, the then Deputy Undersecretary of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

IDEA is a USDA project funded through the McGovern-Dole Food for Education Program. IDEA is one example of the many international humanitarian and development programs that would be a casualty of the President’s drastic proposal to cut U.S. international affairs funding by roughly one-third.

The justification for the cut was that the program lacks evidence that it is being effectively implemented to reduce food insecurity, but our Guatemala program shows that it is indeed making a difference in the lives of children.

Guatemala’s Western Highlands
In the Guatemalan Western Highlands, more than 60% of indigenous children are stunted and more than half are malnourished.  Through the IDEA project, Save the Children feeds more than 43,000 school age children per year, directly addressing food insecurity in the most impoverished region of Guatemala.

A recent independent evaluation of the IDEA program indicated that as a result of the school meals, absenteeism in program schools dropped from 20% to 5% in less than 2 years.[1]  The same evaluation found the number of children who now pay attention in class increased by 40%.  When asked why more children were paying attention in class, teachers said “They are no longer hungry.”

The McGovern-Dole Program
The McGovern-Dole program goes beyond just feeding children who otherwise would not have, in many cases, even one nutritious meal a day.  It integrates health, nutrition, and education interventions that enable children to reach their full potential.   The IDEA program has transformed barren cinderblock classrooms into engaging environments (as seen below) designed to cultivate children’s curiosity and encourage their love of learning. As a result of the USDA McGovern-Dole program, these children have learned to read in two languages: the indigenous K’iche’ language and Spanish.

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