Help disadvantaged Bengali children + young people

The parents of the children at the New Life Centre School have married young. When I was there last year I was told a typical story of the parents of one of the girls in the school. Her father saw her mother when she was in Standard 8, 13 – 14 years old and he told her he wanted to marry her. She refused for a long time as she wanted to continue her education, but he was persistent and eventually she dropped out of school and they were married at 15.

They are happily married but the mother is insistent that her daughter will remain in the school and not drop out like she did. Alindra Naskar the Director of the school, as a father of 3 highly educated daughters is very keen that the girls should remain in school, as they are the future of the country he says, as mothers they will educate their families and lead by example. Education will literally save lives for according to the United Nations Girls Education Initiative, children of educated mothers are twice as likely to survive past the age of five!

The older girls in the school can be seen here and they are given every encouragement at the New Life Centre to carry on with their studies, including remaining at the school for extra curricular studies until the parents are able to escort the girls home. Parents are afraid of their young daughters wandering around the village, as girls have been known to be kidnapped from this area as it is close to the Bangladesh border, but also with Alindra’s encouragement and the understanding of mothers such as the one I spoke of at the beginning of this, parents are becoming enlightened to the prospect of their daughters having choices about their future.

As Barack Obama said when addressing the UN Assembly in 2012, ‘The future …………must be shaped by girls who go to school and those who stand for a world where our daughters can live their dreams, just like our sons’.

Wouldn’t you like to help empower these girls?