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Donate online or mail your contribution to:
Give2Asia
P.O. Box 193223
San Francisco, CA 94119-3223
Make sure to include the name of the fund you wish to support and an address for your receipt.
For donations of securities or other non-cash assets, please download a Gift Form.
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Rural Education Fund
The Give2Asia Rural Education Fund is designed to help children living in rural communities by funding schools, scholarships and learning opportunities where resources are scarce. We ask you to make a contribution of any size to make a difference in these children’s lives.
Education is one of the most powerful tools for reducing poverty and improving lives for children and families in rural communities. Children who attend school receive more support growing up, are kept off the streets, and are less vulnerable to trafficking. In addition to preparing children to become more prosperous as adults, education has a positive ripple affect for future generations; children with mothers who have completed a K-12 education are less likely to be out of school.
Discrepancies in the quality of education between rural and urban areas are significant. Illiteracy is higher in rural areas, while urban areas receive a disproportionate amount of funding. In rural areas, communities are more likely to have problems with non-attendance, dropout rates, and gender inequality. In rural India, the rate of out-of-school children is 60% higher than in urban areas. In Bangladesh, over 80% of out-of school children live in rural areas.
Access to education remains one of the greatest challenges. Either services simply do not exist, or children must travel tremendous distances to attend school. In Cambodia, only 46% of the villages have a primary school; children must travel an average of 5 kilometers to reach their classroom. The more quickly these challenges are overcome, the sooner rural communities will benefit from quality education.
Give2Asia, with our extensive local network in Asia, forms links with charitable groups, local schools and local governments to create education services for children in rural communities. The Rural Education Fund offers an opportunity for you to support this network, which help local communities help themselves and builds the infrastructure for long-term change.
This fund will improve the quality of teaching, give children better access to existing education services, and create new services in rural areas. The Rural Education Fund will support projects such as: 
1) Teacher training and curriculum development
2) K-12 scholarships for children in need, especially girls
3) Mobile libraries and teaching labs
In India, rote-based, didactic and uninspiring education methods do not provide vulnerable, disadvantaged and at-risk children in India with the tools to overcome poverty. As India's government focuses its resources on a small, educated urban elite group of the engineers and scientists, it continues to ignore the country's largest population—the rural communities, which generally lack access to adequate primary and secondary education. It is estimated that 13 million children under the age of 15 are not enrolled in school, most of whom are from rural areas, and a majority of whom are girls driven into bonded labor or domestic work due to extreme poverty.
The Agastya International Foundation, which has received grants from Give2Asia for its mobile science classroom programs, has the unique ability to deliver high-quality, creativity-based basic education services to a large number of vulnerable and disadvantaged K-12 children. Agastya uses innovative, cost-effective channels like Mobile Science Labs and Science Fairs, proven to attract and engage disadvantaged children in education.
Agastya makes learning a) fun and engaging, b) hands-on and creative, c) useful and relevant to the child’s current and future context, d) visible to parents and community members and e) accessible at the village doorstep by the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children. Through Agastya’s innovative programs, rural children acquire the creative energy, learning tools and confidence to overcome their constraints. And, in addition, Agastya trains rural teachers in these communities to use more engaging, hands-on teaching methods to improve the quality of education in rural areas.
In China, many teachers in rural schools have little or no formal teacher training. In order to improve and expand access to education for disadvantaged youth and provide quality training for female teachers in rural areas, the China Soong Ching Ling Foundation, with support from a Give2Asia donor, has developed the Rural Teacher Training Program in Western China (Yunnan, Shaanxi, Ningxia, Sichuan, and Chongqing provinces).
Rural children are four times less likely than urban kids to attend college and only about 15% of rural children ever get to high school. By tackling the underlying problems in rural education, specifically learning curriculum and teaching methods, the China Soong Ching Ling Foundation is working to improve the quality of education, thereby raising students’ interest and motivation for education.
Last year, China Soong Ching Ling Foundation held a teachers’ training course for 483 rural teachers, covering topics such as basic education reform and professional development, curriculum development and student-centered teaching, management strategy and instruction evaluation, new teaching skills and enhanced capacity. The implementation of new curriculum reforms and teaching methods has real implications for rural communities. Good rural education accelerates positive rural development. By helping to make education more accessible, China Soong Ching Ling Foundation is cultivating capable human resources for villages and promoting leadership within rural communities in China.
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