Center for Mass Education in Science (CMES)

A small country with a huge population, Bangladesh is a typical example where informal sector of economy has always played a very important role in the basic survival strategies of the people. Until recently, the formal sector has been a small one and so has been the literacy rate and education and modern skills in general.

Now, some growth in small enterprises in the formal sector, has opened up new opportunities. But to take the proper advantage of these, there should be a smooth transition from the informal works to such new entities, to be attained through feasible and appropriate education and skills. This would be among the next important challenges in the people's economy.

The huge pool of agricultural and other form of labourers are mostly illiterate and helpless, living below the poverty line. The artisans, peasants and traditionally skilled people do hardly better. Many of these vocations are hereditary. The practitioners learn their trade from their elders, and they start very young usually not waiting to be literate or educated. People have always depended on their crafts, but in general put them in one of the lowest rungs in the social ladder.

The artisans in particular, remained awfully poor, and their poverty has been increasing with the fall of demands for their products and services. Yet they had no way of adapting to the new situation by modernizing their crafts.

CMES’s Basic School System has addressed the following problems which had been impeding a meaningful education and the education-skill linkages for a vast member of young people, disadvantaged in various ways.

CMES’s effort takes the shape of an alternative, and a flexible education program which would be more responsive to the livelihood imperatives of the young people from disadvantaged families. Named Basic School System (BSS), this offers diverse options through an integrated education, skill-training and profitable work practice to adolescents and youth who can afford education only in terms of learning while earning. The system has evolved its way to a considerable size, as a model system goes, now serving 20,000 students at a time in 17 different rural areas of Bangladesh.

The focus is on skilled employment and self-employment, and on an exposure to new opportunities and new technology in doing that, in concert with the appearance of such new things in the horizon, even in rural Bangladesh. CMES’s integrated approach makes education a supportive force to skill development leading to immediate income generation and vice versa.

A gender empowerment program, the Adolescent Girls’ Program (AGP), helps the girls in shaking off discriminations and stereotypes and to participate in the new paradigm of people’s economy in the shape of more challenging skilled works.

The discriminations generally suffered by the girls include a lack of freedom of movement, superstitious attitudes towards puberty, early marriage and unequal opportunities in all aspects within and outside the family.

The Adolescent Girls Program addressed these problems. All the components of this integrated program serve to enrich one another education drawing its subjects from livelihood practices while the latter gets its scientific basis in the general education curriculum.

The school-day is divided into an inner campus (class room) and outer campus (practices) situations providing a lot of options. The latter takes place as actual works responding to the local demands for products and services that can be marketed by the system to create income for the students and the school.

To make the system effective, CMES explores the present state of the economic and technology scenario, specially in the informal sector and its transition interface to the formal sector. Its Research and Development component does this in a kind of action research as the system evolves. CMES has done it by piloting small scale income generating activities which have not been tried before in the villages but the demands for which have been dormant here as these were spreading in cities and towns. CMES had to engage in some adaptive research for bringing things into a type and scale suitable for such piloting.

The Service Centre of CMES in Dhaka which have some personnel and facilities to undertake such research, usually initiates these activities on the basis of field level market surveys. These begin as a form of students' learning and practicing subjects. The initial investment comes from CMES and it acts as the risktaker. But in many cases the activities become ultimately profitable. And some of the students graduating from BSS could even start business of their own in these trades.

The skill training ranged from simple soap making, candle making and carpentry to small scale scientific poultry farms and on to bio-fertilizers such as vermicompost and solar electrification and computer use. All the traditional artisan’s and technician’s trades were seen from an educated point of view, and more modern and marketable versions of them were brought within the reach and practices of the people at the grass root.

It is not that all the products and service thus created are marketed within the villages themselves. Some definitely are – even completely new products such as vermicomposts, which the common villagers soon come to appreciate and buy as they do the chemical fertilizers. Even villages have people who would afford new and interesting things as they become available. For example, villagers occasionally did use the services of photographic studioes from the nearby towns. Now the students of BSS are making it available right at their homes – increasing the use a lot.

There are other marketings which are done in nearby cities and towns using BSS’s own marketing channels and those of others. Thus while village potters are happy with the traditional pottery utensils, the BSS students are making fancy decorative vases to be sold in the towns at a much higher price.

Self-employment, as well as employment in the existing enterprises were emphasized in everything that the BSS does. The strength of the microcredit institutions in Bangladesh villages have been fully utilized in this. CMES itself has it own microcredit scheme, which is unconventional in the sense that it introduced microcredit for the youth unmarried girls in particular.

One of the reasons CMES had to start its own microcredit scheme in spite of other stronger providers’ presence, is the fact that others did not regard the adolescents and unmarried girls as credit-worthy. They thought it involves too much risk. But CMES’s success in this field has proved them wrong. The other reason was that CMES tries to link the microcredit with new and non-stereotyped livelihood activities, which others do not insist upon. For CMES the microcredit was only a tool in pursuing its objective, not an end in itself. While this kept the CMES microcredit scheme somewhat limited, it served its purpose better.

To develop the potentials for sustainability, CMES has been working on a new concept in delivery mechanism in which the real-life enterprises in the commercial sector would share responsibilities with a BSS-like institution.

The components for specialized skill can better be delivered by particular enterprises offering long internships to the students. This will widen the scope of technologies to be learnt and the level at which these can be learnt. At the same time it will enhance the immediate employability of the graduates either in these enterprises or later in self-employing small businesses, while depending on some internshipremuneration for the moment.

The BSS-like institute will take care of a further education in general competencies, in accordance with the previous formal or non-formal education of the student. After a period of this and a training of some core skills at the institute, the rest will be a joint responsibility of the institute and an enterprise where the internship would take place.

CMES has been conducting some preliminary survey on the local enterprises, to assess the feasibilities of such institutional partnerships. The responses so far have been quite encouraging. Typical prospective partners being local workshops, small business enterprises, repair-maintenance shops, cottage & small industries, organized agrobased farms such as poultry farm or fish-farm, health clinics, computer centres etc.

EMP/SKILLS - Skills and Employability Department