Preschool Plan Helps Bangladesh Students and Teachers

By David Snyder

Looking back on her own young life, Jasmin Akhter knows she is lucky to be where she is. Married young, she moved in with her husband in the remote village of Sangoil, a small hamlet in northwest Bangladesh. Her fate seemed set to mirror that of so many other impoverished women here: She was a mother and housewife with little social connection to the community. Her dreams seemed limited.

"From childhood I had a desire to be a teacher," Jasmin recalls. "But I got married very early, in [grade] 10."

But in 2005, Jasmin got her chance when she was hired to teach at a school in her community, supported by Catholic Relief Services and designed to provide early childhood education to underprivileged youth in Sangoil. Working through partner agency Caritas Bangladesh, CRS began supporting the school in 2003 by providing educational materials, teacher salaries, and training for local residents interested in teaching at the school.

Today, Jasmin helps teach 56 children in Sangoil. The project gives very young children a chance to attend before they are old enough to start government-run primary schools. In a country where extreme poverty has led to a literacy rate of only 40 percent, this is a critical opportunity for early education.

"Traditionally, schools taught children by lectures," Jasmin explains. "But we teach children based on their desires—sometimes with cards, sometimes with games."

Nurturing Young Minds

Jasmin says that involving the community is one of the main goals of the program. It helps educate children as well as parents in places where hands on a farm have often been seen as more valuable than minds in a classroom. In many cases, parents simply had no access to local schools, which are often miles away, and children fell quickly out of the system.

"Before the children were just doing household work. Parents were not aware their children should be in school," Jasmin says. "Now their parents know the main goal is for their children to go to school."

Today, Jasmin earns a salary of 1,400 taka (about $23) a month teaching at the school. It is a modest but decent income for a rural teacher. But when Jasmin combines her salary with her husband's wages, she's able to save money each month for the first time in her life. Now 26, Jasmin sees that her contributions to the school have made a difference in the lives of her young students, one of whom is her own young son. But she also sees that the school has provided her with opportunities she thought she might never realize.

"I finished my schooling while I was married, but this school gives me the opportunity to earn money and to help others," Jasmin says. "Education now brings me some light."

David Snyder is a photojournalist who has traveled to more than 30 countries with CRS.