Chapter 4 EDUCATION Synopsis

 

Chapter 4 Education designed to value's the (girl/boy) child's life, love of self, collaborative teamwork, communal dignity of everyone as an action learner and livelihood co-creator

Most of 21^st Century brac’s hundred thousand people are skills trainers distributed across rural Bangladesh who value Paulo Freire culture of service learning -indeed St Francis’ quest that female followers practice community health servants and male followers celebrate being nature’s deepest connectors; of course, here are a few engineers too; but I can’t remember having met a bureaucrat in the organization that Abed facilitated. Nowhere is data deeper than when you ensure you are always searching out what the poorest need to be included in the future   

Frankly speaking the foundation of brac around skills trainers started from Abed’s biggest mistake. As one of Asia’s leading young engineers, in 1972 he used his life savings to build 15000 homes for 100000 people whose region had been flattened by the war of independence. Bangladesh is a crowded nation but in other ways Abed’s metavillage 5.1 was one of the most disconnected space in the tropics. No electricity, no engines of any kind.  No sooner than this was built than Abed found dozens of women were dying each week of starvation; scores on infants were dying from dehydration. The desperate “educational” need was to develop business micro franchises in food production and last mile health services- and to train village mothers to operate these with positive cash flows however small but compounding positively

Thus 4.1 WOMENS LIVELIHOOD TRAINING – Through microfranchise design 1.1 and training village mothers’ productive community building to end poverty and actioning sustainability goals started what has become civil society’s most collaborative and largest 21^st C partnership network

Bangladesh was born 8^th largest and poorest nation 90% rural ie villagers without access to electricity. So women empowered action learning networks were all person to person. About 15 years into Bangladesh’s development village mothers could afford to demand village schooling for their children.

4.2 PRIMARY Brac built the largest non-government primary school system – over 40000 one room schools in little more than a decade.  Village mothers operated these schools using brac’s own learning materials. Above all Abed designed in a loving environment for kids t experience but at age 11 moist outperformed city schools run by the government. Designing many children’s  only 6 years of learning made it important to add in “missing curricula”: financial literacy is paractised at 2^nd grade onwards; because brac village mothers deliver most of the last mile health services, health and safety practices are bult into the culture of being a brac student.

4.3 PARTNERS IN SECONDARY – GIRLS JOBS APPRENTICESHIPS PLUS. For various reasons including millennium goals focus on primary schools, Abed could not assemble funds fordesigning secondary schools. Instead he built mainly girls apprentice clubs to partner libaries as well as secondary school scholarships. Brac’s community culture maximised livelihood support for children/families that it linkedin

4.4 UNIVERSITY. 1996: In the second quarter of a century of Brac and Abed’s work tech partners in the form of solar, mobile started to come to the villages. Abed started up brac university. Everything brac and village women empowered networks could be updated there, and much more including the request probably first made by Mrs Stave Jobs that Abed work out which of Bangladesh women’s solutions could be extended to other countries. So, while the university aimed to be sustainability’s best national university, abed wanted to design solutions that graduates of collaborative sdg universities could apply the world over.

4.5 ECP. Early Childhood Playschools were a gap in education all over the world. So, brac university offered Asia’s first masters in ECP. Giving children the earliest experience of a loving space to developm has special advantages in places brac works from the poorest villages to refugee situations. Partners in Early Childhood Playschools can bring world class psychological inputs; and indeed, clarify why brain science supports action learning as the most effective method in so many skills from arts to computer coding to microentrepreneurship.

4.6 Luminaries of Education, Collaboration and Urgent Sustainability Generation. Anything humanity doesn’t yet know how to do- including living sustainably with nature- can only be massively solvable by Education. Before he died, Abed passed on the idea if education luminaries to Hong Kong and tech billionaire Charles Yidan and his newly emerging 4-hemispher education foundation: Yidan Prize & Yidan Luminaries. Luminaries connect practitioners if education with practitioners of anything that can be a solution youth need to be the first SD Generation. each year as well as celebrating new prize winners, luminaries are connecting 4-hemisphere stages for celebrating advances of 360 degree education – today and discipline including tech wizards can positively interact with bringing up the younger half of the world as first SDG generation. For example, Yidan’s director of partnerships is also entrepreneur in residence at Stanford. From Bangladesh to Hong Kong to Stanford to Cambridges (Boston and England) to Oxford to Wuhan let girls and boys joy of co-creating shine.