Education For Social Change & Peace

Hundreds of millions of children are still growing up without even the most basic education. As the main purpose of education is to teach individuals within society to prepare and qualify for work as well as to integrate themselves and to wholeheartedly contribute, each year of school raises a person’s potential income by about ten percent! The percentage of poverty is proportionally equivalent to the percentage of illiteracy and the global education crisis is the greatest challenge facing humanity.

Without the right education system global poverty is going to rise, not just by keeping the uneducated without a job, but also by furthering other causes of poverty like conflict, climate change and environmental destruction by lack of awareness. A truly democratic system will not function without a solid education for everyone, leaving too much room for misinformation and manipulation. But millions are left behind to fall through the cracks of the system.

Increasing an individual’s control of their life and decisions that effect them and everybody else surrounding them is a vital part of human rights. Equal education affects everything from national growth rates, gender-based violence, gang violence, child- and teen pregnancies, child- and maternal mortalities, child marriage and poverty. Children must be taught from a young age to learn from the past to better the present and the future. Any radicalization, extremism, discrimination and manipulation will be greatly reduced with well educated individuals.

The Covid pandemic has opened a great window of opportunity by forcing humanity to rethink, steering us into a new age of digital transformation and online schooling. Large-scale Education leads to democracy, as decision making in state or even community affairs by direct citizens and their representatives requires a good level of education. It involves people at grass roots level that need to make decisions for the common good. Education forms the foundation of any society and is responsible for the economic, social and political growth potential.

At PLeace Awaken we have our own project in development, in the belief that effective child education starts with the parents. Focusing on the monumental problem of gender-based violence and the suffering families, we’re setting up a vocational boarding school and safe haven for abused women and schools for their children. For the men we’re setting up a program to get them through counseling and into a sustainable job to restore dignity for everyone. Momentarily we teamed up with two organizations in Orange Farm, a township in Johannesburg, to effectively start the process of community upliftment.