06 January 2010
For Tráng Mí Lồng, the day starts very early.
The 20-year-old knocks on the doors of the children of his village in Ha Giang - a remote, mountainous province of Vietnam - before commencing the 3 kilometre walk to school.
It can be a dangerous journey, with the streams and tracks that need to be crossed made hazardous by regular flooding.
However, as part of a DFID-supported programme aimed at improving primary education for disadvantaged children, Lồng is on hand to provide the children with an escort from home to school and back again.
Due to the remoteness of their villages, the children in this area of Vietnam are at risk of missing out on an education. Many of these children are also from ethnic minorities that currently lag behind non-minority pupils in educational attainment.
Chi Pang, a local mother, says: “I used to be very reluctant to send my daughter Mi to school as it was not secure for her to travel such a long distance, especially during bad weather. But as Lồng comes to pick her up in the morning and return her by lunch time, she is much safer now."
Lồng's contribution doesn't stop with helping the children get to and from school. He stays the whole day as a bilingual teaching assistant, one of 7,000 recruited across 226 of Vietnam's poorest districts by the programme.
Lessons at Lồng's school are conducted in Vietnamese, though many of the school's pupils speak minority languages. With the help of bilingual text books, Lồng makes sure that the minority language speakers keep up with other pupils. “The lessons are easier with Lồng’s help," says Mi.
The teaching assistants initiative has brought better access, higher enrolment, more regular attendance and lower drop-out rates in all the districts in which it has been implemented. It has also seen students achieve better results, particularly in languages and mathematics.
Facts and stats
- Together with other donors, DFID provided support to the programme from 2003 until 2009. The programme received total funding of £26 million.
- So far the programme has built 14,000 new classrooms and renovated 3,300 classrooms, trained 120,000 teachers and 7,000 bilingual teaching assistants, and established parent-teacher associations in 18,000 schools.
- One hundred and twenty-five innovation grants have been awarded through the programme to address the needs of disabled children, street children, minority girls and other children who are at high risk of missing out on an education.