Non-Formal Education: the only ‘second chance’ for many working children

By Macarena Aguilar

Myanmar’s 2014 census found that 20 percent of the country’s school age children are out of school, with Kayin and other conflict affected States topping the list. 

Many of these children choose to work. Others are driven by poverty to help their families make ends meet. Too many end up in hazardous work settings. Today, child labour is widespread across Myanmar with some 1.2 million children aged 5-17 currently working.

Thirteen year old Arkar Soe is one them. 

©UNICEF Myanmar/2017/Khine Zar Mon

ပထမတန္းစားရလဒ္ကို ရရွိေစတဲ့ ဒုတိယပညာေရးအခြင့္အလမ္း

ေက်ာ္လြင္လတ္ႏွင့္ ဒီရက္ဒရီေနာ့တန္ ေရးသားသည္

ရန္ကုန္၊ ျမန္မာ - ေက်ာ္ေဇာ္မိုးသည္ ၎၏ ရွပ္အကႌ်ကို ဆြဲဆန္႔ကာ ေလွခါးေအာက္ဆံုးအဆင့္တြင္ ေခါင္းကို တေလးတစားငံု႔ကာ ရန္ကုန္ပညာေရးတကၠသိုလ္၊ သင္ၾကားေရး အေဆာက္အအံုရွိ စတိတ္စင္ ေပၚသို႔ ႐ို႕႐ို႕က်ဳိးက်ဳိး၊ ေက်ေက်နပ္နပ္ျဖင့္ တက္လာခဲ့သည္။ ပရိသတ္ႀကီးက ႏွစ္ေထာင္းအားရ လက္ခုပ္ၾသဘာတီးကာ ၎၏ ထူးကဲေသာ ေအာင္ျမင္မႈကို ဂုဏ္ယူေၾကာင္း ေဖာ္ျပၾကသည္။ ယင္းလက္ခုပ္သံမွာ ေက်ာ္ေဇာ္မိုးအား စစ္ေတြေက်ာင္းတြင္ အားေပးကူညီခဲ့ေသာ ဆရာမဆီမွသာမက၊ အလြတ္သင္ မူလတန္းပညာေရးကြန္ရက္မွ ဆရာဆရာမမ်ား၊ ပညာေရး ဝန္ႀကီးဌာနမွ အဆင့္ျမင့္ အရာရွိႀကီးမ်ားႏွင့္ ပရိသတ္အားလံုးဆီမွ လာျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ ေက်ာင္းမွ ထြက္ခဲ့ရသည့္ ၎အတြက္ ယူနီဆက္ဖ္၏ အရည္အေသြးရွိ အေျခခံပညာေရးအစီအစဥ္ (QBEP) က ပံ့ပိုးေပးေသာ အလြတ္သင္ မူလတန္းပညာေရး(NFPE)ကို ဝင္ေရာက္သည့္အခါတြင္ ပညာေရးအတြက္ ဒုတိယ အခြင့္အလမ္း ရရွိခဲ့သည္။



©ယူနီဆက္ဖ္ျမန္မာ/၂၀၁၆/ ဒီရက္ဒရီေနာ့တန္



A second chance at education produces first class results

By Kyaw Lwin Latt and Deirdre Naughton

Yangon, Myanmar- Kyaw Zaw Moe straightens his shirt and dips his head respectfully at the bottom step before he makes his way humbly but purposefully onto the stage at the Learning Hub, Yangon University of Education. He is greeted by rapturous applause from the audience, expressing their congratulations for his remarkable achievement. The applause emanates from the teacher who supported Kyaw Zaw Moe in his Sittwe school, to teachers across the Non-Formal primary Education network, to high-ranking Ministry of Education officials, all of whom are audience members. At 17, having earlier dropped out of school, he was given a second chance at education when he joined the Non-Formal Primary Education (NFPE) model, funded by the Quality Basic Education Programme (QBEP) through UNICEF.


©UNICEF Myanmar/2016/Deirdre Naughton

ေက်ာင္းမေနႏိုင္သည့္ ကေလးသူငယ္မ်ား၏ ဘဝမ်ား - တစ္မိနစ္စာ

ေရးသားသူ Jessica Aumann



©UNICEF Myanmar/2015/Jessica Aumann

အသက္ (၁၂)ႏွစ္ရွိၿပီျဖစ္တဲ့ ခင္စႏၵာဝင္း တစ္ေယာက္ သူမရဲ႕ ဇာတ္လမ္းေလးကို ဘာသာျပန္ ေျပာေပးမယ့္သူအလာကို ပလတ္စတစ္ထိုင္ခံု ပန္းေရာင္ေပၚတြင္ ျပံဳးကာ စိတ္ရွည္လက္ရွည္ ထိုင္ေစာင့္ ေနေတာ့သည္။

”ဆိုင္ကလုန္းမုန္တိုင္း တိုက္ေတာ့ အကုန္ပ်က္စီးသြားတယ္” ဟု သူမက ေျပာသည္။ ”သမီးတို႔ အိမ္ပါ ပါသြားတယ္။”

”မုန္တိုင္းတိုက္ျပီး ေနာက္ပိုင္း ေဖေဖနဲ႕ေမေမ ဧရာဝတီကေန ရန္ကုန္ကို ေျပာင္းသြားတယ္။ သမီးတို႔ ကေလးေတြ အားလံုးကေတာ့ အဖိုးနဲ႔ က်န္ေနခဲ့တယ္။ ေမေမနဲ႔ ေဝးေနရတာကို အရမ္းဝမ္းနည္းၿပီး ဖုန္းေျပာတိုင္း တအား ငိုမိတယ္” ဟု သူမက ေျပာသည္။

The lives of out of school children in one minute

By Jessica Aumann

 

©UNICEF Myanmar/2015/Jessica Aumann

Khin Sander Win is 12 years old. She sits patiently on the pink plastic bench, smiling and waiting for the interpreter to come and help her tell her story.

“When the cyclone came it took everything” she says. “We lost our house”.

“After the storm my mother and father moved from Ayeyarwaddy to Yangon, and we children all stayed behind with my grandfather. I used to talk to my mother on the phone and I would feel so sad to be apart from her, I would cry a lot” she says.