Photo courtesy of Dhammajarinee Witthaya School.
By BGR Staff
According to some metrics, Thailand is a global success story in its progress toward gender equality. Since the 1985 ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Thai government has gradually increased anti-gender-discrimination policy and legislation. Currently, women comprise nearly a quarter of Thai CEOs and managing directors.
However, as in so many countries around the globe, these gains have largely left impoverished women and girls behind. In Thailand, only 5 percent of children from low-income families enroll in universities. Girls living in poverty often drop out of school at a young age, if they have the opportunity to attend school at all. Particularly in rural areas and regions affected by conflict, women are largely relegated to low-paying jobs in agriculture, service, and domestic labor.
For more than 30 years, the Dhammajarinee Witthaya School (DWS) has been providing an education to girls in need. In 1990, a group of Buddhist nuns working in an impoverished area of the southern Thai province of Ratchaburi started a small school for 20 orphaned girls who had completed primary school and had no options for continuing their education. DWS gradually evolved until today it educates 1,000 girls. Of these, 10 to 20 percent are orphans, 30 percent had been abandoned, and 20 percent were living in extreme poverty or were otherwise disadvantaged.
The school offers students an education from kindergarten through high school as well as housing, food, clothing, and health care. DWS is the first and only free boarding school for underserved girls in Thailand, administered by Buddhist nuns. The curriculum includes stress management programs, meditation, and training in traditional values. A BGR project with DWS contributes to the school’s food program, providing three hot meals a day to 65 students—27,300 meals annually. Among the girls enrolling in DWS before age 15, 20 percent are illiterate; yet an astounding 95 percent of the school’s graduates attend university, most being the first in their families to do so.
“I came to the Dhammajarinee Witthaya School because my parents did not have the financial means to care for me and send me to school. I feel very happy to be here. The teachers are like second mothers,” said one 11-year-old student. “In the future I want to return to the school and teach English. I want more girls in Thailand to have a good life as the school has given me.”
This article is adapted from materials provided by the Dhammajarinee Witthaya School.
