WHY MYANMAR?
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Decades of isolation combined with limited access to development and minimal government investment in social sectors has resulted in a gradual decline in the quality of education, widening geographic disparities, and inequitable access to primary education.
Educational Empowerment founders worked with ethnic Burmese groups along the Thai/Burma border in 2010 when Myanmar was still a ‘closed’ country.
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The challenges facing education in Myanmar are large and complex.
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Only 18% of Burmese girls complete secondary school, the lowest rate in all of Southeast Asia.
According to United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), 33% of school-aged children in Myanmar do not attend school, and 70% of those who do are unable to finish at the primary level.
Half of Burmese girls complete primary school, and the majority of those girls do NOT learn critical thinking.
Rote learning, as currently taught in the government schools, is the norm. Libraries are literally non-existent. Most children have never seen nor touched an age appropriate picture book.
Educational Empowerment
believes the answer to ending gender
based violence is EDUCATION.
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Burmese women continue to be victims of domestic violence. Under Myanmar’s penal code, marital rape is only criminalized if the wife is younger than 14 years old.
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No specific laws exist to prohibit domestic violence, and women’s shelters and centers are rare. The most commonly reported internal coping strategy for women in dealing with abuse is to ‘stay silent’.
Education is essential to fostering peace, reducing poverty, and increasing gender equality.
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Faced with displacement, lack of access to education, and poverty, Burmese women exemplify hope, resilience, and joy. Moved by these women’s strength and grace, Educational Empowerment founders were impassioned to empower Burmese women and girls through education and create awareness of Myanmar’s plight.
