Growing up, Alpona wanted to be a school teacher and assure a better life for her parents. But life had other plans, and when a canal was dug next to her home in a remote village in Bagerhat, going to school became impossible.
She had to drop out. Her parents struggled to find a way to send their daughter back to school.
Eventually, her father came to know about a learning center in their village that provided a multi-grade teaching-learning system for primary school dropouts like Alpona.
Eager to be back to studying, Alpona quickly caught up with her studies and was soon readmitted to a school.
These learning centers are run by the Unique Intervention for Quality Primary Education (UNIQUE) II, a project of the Dhaka Ahsania Mission. The project was designed to provide non-formal basic primary education to children aged 6 to 12 years who dropped out of primary schools or have never been to school.
The current project is the second iteration of the UNIQUE project, financed by the European Union.
The six-year-long project, which wraps up Sunday, has sent around 350,000 children to school in this time.
By providing three to four hours of classes in compliance with the government curriculum, five days a week, UNIQUE II has changed lives. The project also discovered that 52% of the students were female. The majority of the teachers were also female.
UNIQUE II Project Director, Golam Faruk Hamim, said the project’s goal was to prepare unprivileged children for mainstream schools.
“Our main target was to include hard-to-reach kids who had to drop out of primary schools because of poverty or difficulty commuting to schools from their homes and to prepare them for mainstream schools,” said Hamim.
The multi-grade teaching-learning system of these learning centres has allowed students to study at their competence level on different subjects.
Learners were grouped by their ability and potential, not by their age. The students received practical experience by embarking on visits to cities and other villages and create content like essays and paintings about their visits.
Hamim recalled some challenges they faced in the early days of the project: “It was difficult to convince the parents to send the children to us. Many of the children were working, and their family needed the money.”
The project was carried out by 4,230 learning centres in Bagerhat, Bandarban, Barguna, Barisal, Bhola, Chittagong, Dhaka, Dinajpur, Feni, Gaibandha, Gazipur, Jamalpur, Khagrachhari, Kishoreganj, Kurigram, Lalmonirhat , Lakshmipur, Mymensingh, Narayanganj, Netrokona, Nilphamari, Noakhali, Patuakhali, Rangamati, Rangpur, and Satkhira.