Grameen Swapna

Education is a fundamental human right and vital to achieving economic growth, increasing income, and sustaining a healthy society. Education is important in helping to improve lives, break the cycle of poverty and ensure that all people, particularly women have control over their destiny. Since the 1996 Grameen Swapna’s Education Programmem has been engaged in a continuous effort to make education more accessible to poor children by both increasing the coverage of schools and improving the quality of education. Significant numbers of children living in remote areas still lack access to schools. High dropout rates, particularly among girls, and lack of universal access remain a problem. Access to education is an issue particularly for children living in remote areas, from extremely poor households or ethnic minority groups. The goal of the Grameen Swapna Education Programme is to make a significant contribution to the achievement of education for all in Bangladesh. We aim to improve the quality and delivery of services in education appropriate to the needs of poor children, in particular girls, and to increase their access to those services.

Our purpose is to help fill the remaining gaps in coverage, retention, and quality of compulsory primary basic education in Bangladesh. Grameen Swapna particularly focuses on improving education to access to girls, orphans and children from poor families. Over 10,000 students are enrolled in Grameen Swapna primary schools, which are designed to give a second chance at learning to the disadvantaged students dropped out from the formal education system. The Education Program complements mainstream school systems with innovative teaching methods and materials, opens primary schools in communities unreached by formal education systems, and brings learning to millions of children, particularly those affected by extreme poverty, violence, displacement or discrimination. We provide need-based training, student mentoring initiatives, and e-learning materials at the secondary level to improve the mainstream secondary education system. So far, 50 thousand students have received basic education from Grameen Swapna’s non-formal primary schools in Bangladesh.