As our kids go back to school, let’s not forget the ones who can’t

As summer draws to a close and the scent of new books and fresh notebooks fills the air, it's that time of year again – back to school season. For many children around the world, this period is marked by excitement, anticipation, and the promise of new learning adventures.

Not every child is this lucky. Some can’t go to school because of war, others because of poverty and some are even prevented from studying simply because they’re girls. Currently, over 250 million children across the world lack basic literacy skills, which we at Muslim Aid find unacceptable.

Education inequality is something that no child should suffer from. When children are in their formative years, their brains work like sponges, and they absorb everything around them. Not only does this mean education is their right, but a lack of education can also deeply impact them in the future – from their ability to learn later in life, to their self-esteem and self-worth.

Not only does every child has a right to secure their own future, but they have a right to take advantage of the wonder that the Divine has gifted them with to explore, learn and become who they want to be.

Education empowers children and keeps them from harm -- for every year a girl remains in school, her average lifetime income increases 10 percent and the odds of her being forced into an early marriage shrink.

We had a great response from our previous model of sponsoring an individual child, but we wanted to optimise our model to help as many children as possible, so after years of research and development, we launched our community-based child sponsorship model in June 2021.

This year, we helped 27,990 students teachers and parents by providing psychosocial care, training, upgrading equipment and buildings, medical screenings, accessibility for disabled and bringing those who had to leave education back to school.

We investigated the root causes of students, especially girls, not being able to school and tackled them head on. In Bangladesh, we met with community leaders to ensure the routes girls were taking to school were safe, in Somalia we worked with the education ministry to bring back children to school and we provided hygiene training and equipment to schools and pupils directly. Read more about our life-changing Community-Based Child Sponsorship programme here. Sign up to our child sponsorship programme now and expand your sadaqah jaariyah.