In Bangladesh, Children Get a Second Chance at Education

Children attending the Ananda Schools in Bangladesh look like almost any other adolescents and pre-adolescents around the globe. They are energetic and playful with one another, and, alternatively, attentive to their teachers and their school work.

But unlike their peers, these students, who range from ages 8 to 14, are only now gaining access to the critical, foundational learning they should have gotten at a much younger age. They’re getting it carefully managed, informal educational settings that help them catch up to the students their age and get the skills they need to enter and succeed in a mainstream secondary school environment. 

Reaching The Hard to Reach

These programs, called Reaching Out-of-School Children, or ROSC, are an innovative response to the large, but steadily dwindling cohort of Bangladeshi children – about 5.5 million, as late as 2010 – who didn’t start primary school when they should have.

Nearly all the ROSC students come from families struggling with desperate poverty, which left them unable to afford the uniforms, books, or transport they may have needed to go to school, or probably also required them to work and earn vital income for the family.

Conceived and operated by the Government of Bangladesh with $130 million in support from the World Bank, ROSC has since 2002 enrolled approximately 690,000 out-of-school children in 20,400 Ananda Schools located in 148 poorest rural upazilas, or administrative sub-districts.

The Ananda Schools notably adapt teaching to serve each child’s level of learning and special circumstances. And students are taught by a single class teacher, who can follow and nurture their progress until they can sit for the Grade 5 examination and move up to secondary school.

ROSC enables local communities to have autonomy over their own Ananda Schools, making them more accountable and responsive to parents and students like. Nazma, whose daughter went through an Ananda School. “I am happy we women have a say in our children’s education,” Nazma says. 

Spreading “Joy”

The results so far have been impressive. Nearly 90 percent of students routinely attend their classes, and teachers are also reliably present and well trained. By 2012, 83 percent of ROSC students passed the national grade 5 examinations. And about half of all the Ananda School students were girls, a stark contrast to many other low-income countries where boys are far more likely to get an education.

ROSC’s trajectory of success puts on it track to give a second chance to a cumulative total of 720,000 children in 148 of Bangladesh’s most disadvantaged and remote upazilas by 2017.

Ananda means “joy,” an apt name for schools that have given hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi children a chance to rise beyond poverty, eventually to help their families, communities and country to do the same.