Supporting Inclusive Education
The Covid-19 pandemic created a huge disturbance in the livelihood and development of all people, with the children aged 10 years old and below being locked out of schools. This results in a decrease of literacy rate amongst children as Cecilia (2022) presented that 57% of children were not able to read properly, where this number is estimated to have risen to 70%. Furthermore, the pandemic created a barrier of inaccessibility in the requirements in integrating to a distance learning setup, especially children in less fortunate families. In the first four months of 2020, the number of out-of-school youths has risen from 16.9% to 25.2% (U.S. Embassy Manila, 2021)
With the educational systems in many countries awareness that an online mode of learning is ineffective in teaching students, especially ones in primary school, they have expedited the opening of schools to a face-to-face learning setup.
Starting the school year 2022-2023 the Department of Education (DepEd) of the Philippines have reintroduced face-to-face learning modality nationwide. There are now a total of 28,035,042 enrolled learners in public and private schools nationwide based on the latest data from DepEd (Hernando-Malipot, 2022). However, the Philippines Statistics Authority (PSA) reported in 2022 that the age group of between 5 and 19 has a population of 32.8 million in 2020. Consequently, this means that there are at least 4 million out-of-school youths in the country.
Kariton ng Maralita Network is an alliance of individuals and organizations in the aim of defending the rights and raising the demands of the UP urban poor communities. (Kariton ng Maralita Network, n.d.)
The Kariton ng Pag-Asa project aims to provide a long term and sustainable impact in aid of education. In partnership with the Kariton ng Maralita Network, the Upsilon Sigma Phi and Sigma Delta Phi will be turning over 2 Kariton Klasrums filled with books, art materials, sports materials, chairs, and other necessities to provide a conducive learning experience to the out of school youth of Barangay UP Campus. 3-hour learning sessions will be hosted regularly with the kids to teach them basic math, english, science, and history.
This initiative will be in line with the fraternity’s imperative of service and mission to create an environment conducive to learning in the University of the Philippines and Economic stability and political maturity in the Republic of the Philippines by helping the youth be the builders of our tomorrow in our goal of gathering light to scatter.
