Help Without Frontiers

A good education offers the chance for a better future. Along the Thai-Myanmar border, the uncertain economic and legal conditions in which migrant families are forced to live is likely to impair children’s access to education and eventually endanger their access to future opportunities.

Help without Frontiers (HwF) is committed to promoting education equality for all children, regardless their gender, religion, or ethnicity. Since 2002, Help without Frontiers has placed 54,000 students in the Ray of Hope schools, namely Migrant Learning Centres (MLCs) overseen to give hope and chances for promoting children’s access to education. For the school year 2019/2020, Help without Frontiers Thailand Foundation provides direct support to 14 MLCs and four dormitories with almost 3,000 children in Mae Sot, Phop Phra and Mae Ramat areas. HwF Thailand pays out teachers’ salaries, covers schools’ running costs for maintenance and utilities such as drinking water and electricity, and delivers stationery and teaching materials. The former staff of Happy Tailor, the sewing workshop that we run from 2008 to 2017, has set up a shop called Happy Group from which we purchase school uniforms for all students. 

To empower children, parents, and teachers, HwF Thailand offers awareness raising and training on the importance of education among migrant communities. Moreover, many Ray of Hope schools built capacity after having received income generation training and seed funding establishing agriculture and animal husbandry. The schools are bound to respect strict transparency requirements for the funding management by participating in monthly meetings to discuss problems, monitor individual activities, adjust curricula, receive accounting trainings, and by submitting annual financial reports.

Since all students and most teachers have Burmese nationality, all MLCs use the Burmese curriculum and HwF Thailand implements alternative accreditation programmes to ensure formal recognition of children’s education by the Burmese Ministry of Education. Indeed, HwF coordinates testing for the Myanmar Board Exam and offers non-formal education whereby students spend 10 extra hours per week in the classroom to earn the equivalent of two years in the formal education system for every year completed.

In collaboration with the Thai Ministry of Education, the International Organization for Migration, and Save the Children Thailand, Help without Frontiers enrols out of school children in MLCs and Thai public schools, with special regard to vulnerable and marginalised Rohingya and Muslim communities.