This essay was written by Thaddar Eain Si, age 23, from Burma/Myanmar in response to the 2021 Global Voices essay contest in Southeast Asia. Thaddar was awarded honorable mention for this entry.

Education has always been an indispensable part of my life since childhood, and I would describe my younger self as a happy and curious child at school who puts her academics first and foremost. Being a naïve kid still in her first decade, I used to think that we all indiscriminately receive equal opportunities and access to education. Never did my younger self  know that what she had been enjoying for all her life, assuming it as a birthright, was actually a privilege. Not until she went on a month-long trip to Kalaw, a town in Southern Shan State of Myanmar known for its eco-tourism and the ethnicity’s unique customs, did she learn.

At that time, my family and I stayed at the meditation center, so I had a perfect opportunity to explore the natives’ unfiltered voices and thoughts reflecting their day-to-day experience. I met and made friends with a local girl who was around the same age as me. When I tried to make a natural conversation with her by bringing up a school subject I had learned, I was astonished by her reply that she had quit school after primary school at the age of 10. What astonished me more was that it was forced by her own parents in order to put her into child labor to bring income to her family. I could feel that she was still reminiscent of her school days when she talked about her happiest times at school and the joy she felt when she scored the highest grades in her class. She said if any opportunity or luck was given, she would choose to go back to school again. So, with the heavy heart in me determined to help her to the best of my ability, I commenced my first ever peer-to-peer tutoring sessions with her for ten days. Despite being a student myself, I could see that with her diligence and enthusiasm, she would clearly excel in her studies and could create a positive impact for her community in the future if she were given a chance. Since then, I have always wondered how many children with lost dreams and shattered potentials like her have already been removed from school, how much brain drain has already occurred. 

Such tragic incidents are actually more common than we would like to think. According to the statistics in the United Nations Population Fund's (UNFPA) 2014 Report on Education, over 200,000 Myanmar youth are illiterate, with Shan state youth severely suffering from an illiteracy rate below 50 percent. Such a figure is consistent for some southeast Asian countries as well, such as Cambodia and Laos, with education rating index being the lowest among the development indicators (UNFPA Report on ASEAN Youth Development Index, 2017). The statistics have clearly indicated that education is still underfunded in those countries, and special attention with effective action is needed to elevate those indexes. 

Moved to action by those statistics, my interaction in Kalaw, and school closures due to COVID-19, I, along with several like-minded youth around Myanmar, have founded a not-for-profit youth organization called Myanmar New Generation Association (MNGA). It initiates unique virtual programs that nurture peer-to-peer guidance in subjects such as English language, public speaking and debate, teacher training, and foreign languages. MNGA has successfully reached its first year milestone last September. We believe that education is not confined to just literacy and numeracy, but also includes critical thinking, digital literacy, and other soft skills which we incorporate into our teaching sessions. Furthermore, we have also created a sub-brand called MNGA Education to provide a virtual high-school tutoring program for the high-school students in Myanmar who have lost nearly two years of their education,  by teaching English, Mathematics and other workplace-relevant skills. Our programs have already provided over 130 youth around Myanmar with well-qualified education throughout our first year, despite the interference of COVID-19 pandemic and the coup d’état of the Myanmar military. 

Even though we have already made satisfactory progress so far, I realize that this is not enough to reach our targeted youth whose access to education is bleak. The current internet censorship and internet suppression in several areas of Myanmar has caused our services to be nearly inaccessible for the youth in those suppressed areas. As an alternative solution, we are now contacting NGOs and organizations that support the Internally Displaced People (IDP) camps and sending them video clips of our lectures and sharing sessions to help youth there recieve an education and feel connected with the outside world. Since Myanmar is ethnically diverse, we are now trying to accommodate the lectures and sharing sessions with ethnic languages such as Shan and Karen in order to reach minorities who cannot speak Burmese.

In these difficult times, it is a great challenge to create a sustainable solution to continuously accessible education for everyone. However, we won’t let the statistics and the obstacles discourage us to ultimately give up. Our centuries of history has shown how a lack of education has transformed into a root cause for more tragedies and vengeance, and it is now in our hands to put a stop to it. The journey may be rocky, but together with innovative solutions and global support, we believe that this could turn into a seed for a positive change in the future.