Investing in the youth for a sustainable future
Youth Empowerment Extra-Curricular Courses since July 2015:
Youth Empowerment Extra-Curricular Courses since July 2015: With annual grants from EMpower (The Emerging Markets Foundation), to address the challenges faced by our youth in their remote mountain communities, compared to their peers in urban areas of access to transport, tertiary education, specialist support services, etc, we designed a series of carefully structured extracurricular life skills and vocational training programmes to empower our junior and senior high school students, through hands-on training in nutrition, reproductive health, financial and computer literacy, gender equality, photography, university and job readiness, leadership, community-based advocacy skills, etc., to become “Agents of Change” to lead their communities towards much healthier, stronger and more sustainable futures.
Since 2018, our ‘returning students; (those in their 3 rd year) have proposed the coming year’s modules, in discussion with our facilitators, leading to more focus on IT, internet research, responsible social media use, website and video design together with their selection of creative projects, including sports, graphic
design, community interviews and meetings to initiate new customary laws in their respective traditional villages to prevent school dropout and early marriage.
Our Impact
230
Youth Received Empower Extra-curricular Training from July 2015 till December 2022
“I am happy that my friend and I made a short film about CEFM (child marriage) in EMpower creative
projects since there are still a few CEFM cases in our village and we want to raise people’s awareness through the video.”
TIARA
Grade 10 Pengalusan School
“As a student, I am very happy with this rule in the community, so that all children focus more on learning, both at school and at home, so that after graduating high school, they can follow education to a higher level and a better future.”
Rinjani
Grade 12 Darmaji School
(Students Customary Village rules Advocacy class)
“Now, we are confident to create the campaign video of the issues we’re working on and hopefully can get bigger support through social media.”
PERI
Grade 10 Manikaji School
(EMpower class with guest content-creator teachers)
“It was a memorable day for me. Communication between parents and children is very important to build a support system and I hope there is no more school dropout in my village.”
Artawan
Grade 11, Darmaji School
(Photovoices Creative Projects)
Our Approach
Following EBPP principles of ‘Seeing by example and Learning by Doing’, our hands-on approach empowers our students, who typically break up into small groups to work together on projects, compare with their peers, and adapt all examples to their own environment and aspirations, in collaboration with their facilitators, to achieve outcomes that can be tried and tested. As we explore more complex challenges, we invite experts to present, guide and collaborate with our participants who learn by doing to develop their skills and expertise that they can further explore and develop in their own time - whilst always focusing on their long term goals and aspirations.
Other Projects
Our Work
