Educate 140 Refugees on The Thai-Burma Border

Over the past few months, The Branch Foundation staff and leaders from Koung Jor Shan refugee camp have been working hard to ensure continued and sustainable access to supplementary education for the children and young adults of this vibrant community. Every once and a while, it is good to take stock of the project as a whole and that's exactly what we have focused our efforts on.

With the help of external evaluators, we conducted interviews with the community leaders, teachers and students to help us understand what the current needs are and how best we can serve them. During this process, we learnt many things to help us improve the educational activities. For example, the Burmese language classes were not seeing the attendance levels that the community expected mainly because the students wanted to focus their attention on English. This means that we can redirect our support to the areas that the community and students feel is most vital for their education and future career paths.

There are many other things that we learnt from the assessment and we keen to work with the teachers and students of Koung Jor Shan refugee camp to refocus some areas of this project and to help implement systems that enable the long term sustainability of providing children and young adults with the opportunities to reach their full potential.

During the recent interviews, one 14-year-old female student told us the following:

"I can learn a lot in our camp. Classes in subjects such as English and Computer Studies are a big help for my future."

We look forward to keeping you up to date with all the exciting changes that will be happening over the next few months.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom Rosen and The Branch Foundation Team

Links:

• The Branch Foundation's website
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