While the Government of Lao PDR prioritises human development as critical to staying on track to move from the status of a ‘least developed country’ to a ‘more developed country’ by 2024, troubling education patterns are seen in rural and remote ethnic minority communities.
There is a significant gap between the deprivations experienced by majority Lao-Tai children – who speak the majority language and generally live in urban areas – and ethnic minority children who speak local languages and generally live in remote, rural and sparsely populated communities. For example, research from UNICEF in 2017 revealed that at primary level, 94% of children from the Lao-Tai group attend primary school, but only 83% of children from Mon-Khmer minority families do.
Within remote, rural communities, physical, structural and social barriers limit access to health, education and child protection services. This becomes even more pronounced when viewed through a gendered lens, with a 2016 study by Plan International Laos finding that gender beliefs and attitudes contributed to less value being placed upon girls’ education in ethnic minority communities, leading to girls not finishing school.
According to Laos’ 2015 Population and Housing Census, females were more than twice as likely to be unschooled than males, with 21% of adult females reported to have no educational attainment compared with 10% of adult males. Beyond the gender discrepancies, further inequity becomes apparent when breaking the statistics down further, with the country’s lowest literacy levels found among the female population living in rural areas without roads.
To improve early grade literacy and bring education and economic opportunities to marginalised, rural populations, Aide et Action has been supporting the Laotian government’s multi-year rollout of a new curriculum for primary school students through teacher training, flexible learning strategies such as learning through play activities and mobile libraries, the development of an educational app and specific education and entrepreneurship opportunities for rural women.
Our projects operate under an MoU signed with the Lao Ministry of Education and Sports (MOES) and in 2020, we reached 14,367 people and 60 schools.
