In late April this year, CFSI and BRAC signed a Memorandum of Agreement for a three-year cooperation in the conflict-affected areas of Mindanao, Philippines. Called the Basic Education Project (BEP), this joint initiative aims to bring quality basic education for pre-school and school-aged children in the provinces of Maguindanao and Lanao del Sur. This new engagement will build on CFSI’s experience in carrying out its “Arms Are for Hugging” Project, and is informed by BRAC’s Alternative Delivery Model (ADM).
Under the BEP, CFSI will construct Community Learning Centers in fifteen municipalities in Maguindanao and Lanao del Sur, for a total of 57 barangays (villages) in both provinces. These areas were chosen because they have very limited or difficult access to day care centers or public elementary schools, like many disadvantaged communities in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). Recurrent armed conflict over more than four five decades has displaced hundreds of thousands and led to chronic instability. Consequently, compared to all other regions in the Philippines, the ARMM posts the highest poverty incidence at 56%, and ranks among the lowest in education indicators.
Increasing access to education will require more than constructing school buildings. With this in mind, CFSI will mobilize, train, and deploy qualified volunteers from the communities to teach classes for out-of-school children aged five to twelve. School instruction will be based on the Department of Education (DepED) curriculum, which CFSI will enhance with indigenous learning and teaching materials. The BEP will build the capacity not only of educators, but parents and communities as well. By participating in managing and monitoring the project, parents and community leaders will play an important role in helping children advance through elementary school. When the three-year project is completed in 2015, these community-based schools will have served at least 2,500 children from pre-school to Grade 3.
CFSI will build on more than 10 years of experience in designing as well as implementing projects for early childhood care and development (ECCD), child protection, and education in the conflict-affected areas of Mindanao. In 2001, CFSI started the “Arms Are for Hugging” Project in Barangay Inug-Ug, Pagalungan, Maguindanao. With support from various local and international foundations, private donors, and the DepEd, CFSI mobilized the community to establish Inug-Ug Elementary School (IES) by constructing school buildings and training school teachers. Officially integrated into the DepEd system, IES now provides elementary education from Grade 1 to 6 for about 800 students every year. IES will celebrate its tenth year of operation in October 2012.
“Like Barangay Inug-Ug, the communities we selected for the Basic Education Project are located in remote areas. If children from these communities want to attend school, they usually need to walk long distances to the town center or the next barangay. We’d like to bring the education closer to them,” explains CFSI Director for Philippine Programme Vladimir Arcilla Hernandez. “This is what the project is really about, to enable communities to pick up the pace of educating their children, a jumpstart from poverty.”
About the sustainability of this initiative, he elaborates, “For the long term, we’re hoping to achieve integration into the broader public school system. We’d like to hire local people with education backgrounds as learning facilitators in these community-based schools. If they become licensed, it would be much easier for DepEd to hire them officially as public school teachers. DepEd can then build on the community-based school system that CFSI and BRAC started in these remote, conflict-affected areas.”
“It’s going to be a tall mountain to climb, but we’re taking the first step. With our experience in Inug-Ug Elementary School, we believe this is a workable model.”
CFSI is implementing the BEP in partnership with BRAC and DepEd. Based in Bangladesh, BRAC is an international development organization that works in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. BRAC is globally recognized for its expertise in education, especially non-formal education programmes for children who never enrolled in, or dropped out of primary school.
Funds for this cooperation have been provided by the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) under the Basic Education Assistance for Mindanao-ARMM (BEAM-ARMM) programme.