What do we do
E-lluminate aims to place quality teachers into refugee learning centers, instilling enterpreneurship and vocational training, to seek sustainability for the learning centers.
Our approachAs of end March 2017, there are some 150,845 refugees and asylum-seekers registered with UNHCR in Malaysia and 35,941 of them are children below the age of 18. However, Malaysia is not a signatory of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. In other words, not only there is no refugee camps to accommodate the refugees, the refugees are not granted access to formal education and there is no ways in seeking sustainability for their future.
Currently, only 28 percent of these children have access to any kind of education. Refugee children who have access to education in Malaysia attend either education projects run by UNHCR in partnership with Non-Governmental Organisations, or community-based education classes organised by the refugee communities themselves. There is a lack of quality teachers in these community-based refugee learning centres. They sustain the learning centres by receiving funds from public or faith-based group
and relying on volunteers to provide education assistance.
Quality education and vocational trainings are important to ensure the children to develop the necessary knowledge, capabilities, skills, and values required for realising their full potential. We involving children in defining their learning goals, and portfolios, taking into account their views and understanding what is relevant to them along their individual development process, encouraging them to work on their strength. Entrepreneurship can empower children to actively co-create their learning environment together and own the ability to contribute towards sustainability of the schools.
Our Journey
As of now, we have placed 3 full time teachers in 2 refugee schools. We are having collaborations with Biji-Biji, More Than Gift, Black Milk Project and Petrosains, in order for students to gain exposure to vocational trainings like jewelry making, sand bottle making and hand calligraphy. With the skills gained from the workshops, we managed to propose such initiatives to the CSR departments of companies to arrange interactive sessions.
Other than that, we work with MAD8 Group to provide entrepreneurship skills starting to work with students at a teenager level, in the future we are aiming to instill enterpreneurship as low as primary level.
What do we need
We are raising a total fund of RM150,000.00 per year to cover teacher salary, material costs and administrative costs. We are also looking for other vocational trainings like public speaking, woodwork and elementary level of accounting for our students.
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