Education, Careers & Professional News
Cut-Outs Campaign For Education
Cardboard cut-outs representing 100 million children who do not go to school are to be presented to politicians in a global campaign.
Thousands of children throughout the world are making the cut-outs as part of this weeks seven-day campaign.
The figures, being presented to politicians at schools, come with the slogan Send my friend to school.
The project is organised by the Global Campaign for Education, which includes charities and teachers groups.
Youngsters struggling to get an education will be among those taking part in the campaign.
One of the groups involved, Plan International, says 600 street- or working-children with cut-outs will take part in a demonstration in Hanoi, Vietnam on April 23.
Among them will be 12-year-old Duong, who scrapes a living with her grandfather selling tea on the streets of Hanoi.
She has been attending evening classes for street children since she was eight. She does not have a birth certificate so cannot go to regular school.
Expelled
Plan is campaigning to get all children registered in their home countries so they can go to school.
In Germany, about 3,500 children from more than 100 schools will be making cut-out friends in various sizes, representing girls and boys who are currently denied an education.
The life-size friends will be presented to local and national politicians who have been invited to go to the schools to accept the cut-outs as a token of their commitment to their pledges concerning the millennium goal of education for all.
A group of 40 to 60 students will meet the vice-president of the German Bundestag, Susanne Kastner, in front of the parliament in Berlin on Thursday.
At Nigbo primary school in southern Benin, children are making cut outs of two of their friends, Youda and Nogo, and of scores of other children who cannot go to school.
They plan to send the models to Benins President Mathieu Kerekou.
According to Plan International, 10-year-old Nogo was expelled from school three years ago because his parents could not afford to pay the minimum school fees of $4 (2.11) per year. He is now a farm labourer.
Youda, who is 12, dropped out of school because she did not pass the exams to get into high school.
Yaodas parents could not afford the books and equipment she needed for her studies, the charity said.
She always struggled with her school work because often there was no food at home and she was hungry. In any case, after walking twelve kilometres (7.5 miles) every day, to get to school and back, she was too tired to concentrate on homework.