What is Helping Hands?
‘Helping Hands’ is a community service project established to provide funding, resources and general capacity-building to ethnic minority primary schools in in the Sa Pa area, Lao Cai Province, Vietnam.
What are the main goals of Helping Hands?
- To improve the situation in local primary schools by working with staff from the schools to find out what they need most, and to provide funding, resources and capacity-building as and when the Project can.
- To have a direct and positive effect on local schools and the well-being of the young children in the local minority communities.
What is Project Sa Pa School?
Project ‘Sa Pa School’ is our first community project. The project will provide funding and resources for San Sa Ho Primary School which serves the H’mong ethnic minority community of Sin Chai, Sa Pa.
Project Background
Among the regions in Vietnam, poverty incidence is higher and deeper in the Northern Mountain and Central Highlands. Lao Cai Province, in the far North of Vietnam is one of the poorest regions in the country. Most adults are subsistence farmers, but the mountainous terrain is very labour intensive and families struggle to make ends meet. Sa Pa, a popular tourist destination in Vietnam and famous for its scenery and ethnic minority groups remains one of the poorest districts of Lao Cai province. The district’s remote mountainous areas make the delivery of educational service more difficult. Sa Pa’s educational attainment rate, especially for women and ethnic minorities, is much lower than other districts. Although the government waives tuition fees, parents can barely afford the associated costs of sending their children to school. Other factors that keep Lao Cai’s enrolment rates the lowest in Viet Nam include language barriers, poor and outdated teaching methods used in many schools and dilapidated classrooms. Many of the Primary and Secondary schools in the area suffer from an inordinate lack of even the most basic resources and facilities. Most schools have insufficient classrooms, sanitary facilities, desks, chairs and textbooks. Classrooms often have poor quality blackboards and some chalk, but that is the extent of their teaching resources.