Education For Empowerment

With each passing day, education becomes more and more important.

Today, 258 million children and youth worldwide still do not attend school while 617 million children and adolescents cannot read and do basic math. This situation has only worsened since the onset of COVID-19, which disrupted the provision of education all over the world, cutting off access to millions due to the lack of infrastructure and equipment to study online. 

Rural Sri Lankans too have suffered, with stories of students travelling miles to access the internet for online education and others who simply do not own a smartphone/computer and are therefore completely left out of the education process. 

This year’s theme for International Education Day is therefore more important than ever before; ‘Recover and Revitalize Education for the COVID-19 Generation’. Now is the time to power education by stepping up collaboration and international solidarity to place education and lifelong learning at the centre of the recovery from this pandemic. ‘

As of 2020, the Foundation of Goodness has empowered 19,643 rural individuals through our knowledge based courses, 5,268 through our women’s empowerment courses, 6,139 by way of our Information Technology courses and 6,750 through our sports courses. COVID-19 forced us to re-think how we deliver our lessons, with some teachers visiting rural homes to deliver homework and lessons and further brainstorming and troubleshooting efforts have lead to initiating a “Digital Village” concept in order to deliver lessons online and prevent any disruptions due to lockdowns. 

The Foundation of Goodness continues to firmly believe that education is the way out of the cycle of poverty that entraps many rural individuals and that by offering our courses free of charge, we provide the opportunity for them to learn new skills to better themselves and move up in life. Countless success stories have validated our empowerment courses, encouraging us to continue to refine our curriculums and increase the variety of our courses.

Without inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong opportunities for all, countries will not succeed in achieving gender equality and breaking the cycle of poverty that is leaving millions of children, youth and adults behind.