About the Cause
Dubai Cares’ programs are designed to reduce, if not remove, the greatest obstacles that prevent children and young people in developing countries from attaining quality education. With each intervention, Dubai Cares evaluates the need for assistance across two key areas:
Access to Education which allows Dubai Cares to improve children’s health and learning environment, increase education enrollment and attainment, increase access to education, reduce absenteeism, increase gender parity and increase promotion rates.
Quality of Education which enables early learning, enhances educational attainment and school progression, improves literacy and numeracy skills among children, enables teachers to access teacher training resulting in better learning outcomes, reduce dropout rates and increase primary school attainment.
Dubai Cares is a long-term advocate of safeguarding children and young people’s right to education and is currently playing a global advocacy role in spreading the knowledge about the importance of providing education to the unprivileged children.
We also champion education through research - There is an overwhelming lack of evidence as to what works to promote children’s learning in crisis-affected contexts. Research plays a pivotal role in tackling this issue.
My Story
Research shows that young people in Malawi are greatly deprived in the area of education. More than 80% of young people aged 15 to 17 years lack access to quality education, hampering their chances of attaining decent and sustainable livelihoods. The need to ensure access to quality vocational and education opportunities is therefore critical. It has been proven that VET can help empower the youth with skills required to participate meaningfully in socio-economic development initiatives. Since Malawi started investing in skills training, employment opportunities for youth have improved. However, such vocational education and training opportunities are hampered for many disadvantaged groups because of underlying circumstances that hinder them from accessing life transforming services. In particular, disadvantaged groups such as children/youth living on the streets, youth in conflict with the law are hampered from accessing VET training. Furthermore, other vulnerable groups such as girls at risk of prostitution, early marriages and those exposed to domestic labour also face challenges accessing vocational education and training opportunities. God Cares Rights Foundation conducted a survey in 2012 by God Cares in eleven markets of Mzuzu City shared to all district stakeholders, 362 street children were identified. All of them dropped out of school citing different reasons like death of their parents and ill-treatment by step parents. Most of the street children are pushed to streets when their basic needs like food, shelter, education, medical care, protection and security are neglected. While in streets, these children are at a high risk of being infected and affected with HIV/AIDS due to their vulnerability as most adults take advantage of the situation to sleep with them (defilement) without even using any protection. Some children are into drug and substance abuse, forced child marriages and other forms of child abuse.