Categorized as: Asia, Education, Girls & women, Grantee, Stories, Youth & Tagged as: BetterStories Limited, British Council, Coding, Computers, Kids Go Coding, Technology on January 28, 2017. Related Grantees: Akilah Institute for Women, Medha, The School Fund.

By Suzanne Skees

JAAGO: Extending Quality Education for All

Born into a lineage of poverty in the slums of the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, Nila might have followed in her parents’ footsteps for a lifetime of arduous manual labor and chronic hunger. However, our amazing Catalyst Grant partner, JAAGO Foundation, stepped in to ensure Nila–and one hundred students like her–got a good, free education, including training in computer coding, that will empower her for lucrative employment.

“We are training children from the slums, targeting those children who are from less advantaged families,” says Kids Go Coding Cofounder Umme Sharmin Kabir, “to support them to shape their future and shape their life.”

JAAGO Foundation, launched by Korvi Rakshand in 2007 with seventeen children in a tin shed, has grown to serve 2,200 students in thirteen schools. They also have developed curricula and textbooks for online distance learning that reaches another one hundred schools in remote rural schools that often face challenges in retaining qualified teachers. Their online school is designed to bridge the quality gap in education through the modern technology; and their vision is to establish a free-of-cost, international-standard school in every district of the country.

Intending to equip their students as “global citizens,” Korvi explains, JAAGO emphasizes English-language studies and offers health and hygiene training as well as medical care to students and their families. “When we first got started,” Korvi says, “these kids could dream of nothing more for their future than maybe to be a rickshaw puller . . . Now, they’re dreaming of growing up to be computer engineers, doing coding and robotics.”

Kids Go Coding: Nila’s Story

Now that JAAGO offers technical training in software coding and programming, children such as Nila can dream of creative work in jobs that pay well. “By the time I finish schooling,” Nila smiles, “my mother will be old. So I will design a robot to do her housework for her, and I will take care of her.” She will also help transform Bangladesh into a nation with a talented, trained, young workforce–thanks to JAAGO.

JAAGO in the MY JOB Book

Traveling to Bangladesh for the first time, I wanted to interview a bicycle-rickshaw taxi-driver there, since Dhaka is known as the “rickshaw capital of the world.” That interview became the first of many and a chapter in our social-mission book, MY JOB: Real People at Work Around the World. Check out Chapter 6 by Muhammad, a longtime rickshaw puller and proud dad to two JAAGO students. Read more about Muhammad here, and get your copy of the book here.

Photographs and video courtesy of JAAGO Foundation. 

LEARN more about JAAGO here.

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DONATE directly to JAAGO’s mission to break the cycle of poverty through education and rebuild Bangladesh here.

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