In 2019, AFD China joined the “Let the Swan Fly” public welfare project, providing the fund of 16 months' salary to a teacher from the Yanjing Little Swan Public Welfare School, a school for migrant workers’ children. Now, almost one year on, how is everything going with the students there?

According to the School’s principal, in 2019, with jointed efforts made by family, school and society, another three excellent students who completed basic education there have been admitted to a key high school in Hebei. Meantime, in order to meet the requirements of the Ministry of Education (In the New Curriculum Standard, the Ministry of Education requires to gradually promote programming education and encourages schools to greatly enhance the requirement on students’ abilities in programming, computational thinking and algorithmic method) and to accommodate the rapid development of science and technology, since the first half of 2019, the School has been offering the course of robot programming, and meantime combining the programming course with some mind training courses, such as gobang, puzzle ring and Rubik’s cube, so that the students’ mental exercises and programming skills may complement each other. The School hopes that in this way, the students’ logical thinking and problem-solving abilities may be developed and improved, and their latent creativity may be enhanced.

To help those children build up morally sound values and outlook on the world and life, from the students’ first grade, the School has begun to arrange some time every day for the students to read some extracurricular books under the guidance of their teachers, hoping that they can become useful talents for the society after they get out of school. As the saying goes, to open a book is always beneficial, so we believe that the accumulation of knowledge through reading will certainly lead the children to a more wonderful world. 

Education is the foundation of a country. Good education needs not only adequate material resources, but also excellent teachers. We hope that by subsidizing the teachers and thus relieving them from worrying about their salaries, we hope we can not only retain more excellent teachers for the children there, but also enable the teachers to be more dedicated to making a difference in the lives of those children.

In 2020, AFD China will continue to join charity activities and fund another excellent teacher from the School, hoping to lay a foundation for the children there to fulfill their dreams in the future. Just as the value of each life is equal, we believe that children's access to education should also be equal. We will continue to do our bit to achieve this balance. It is also hoped that more and more caring people will join us in this charity activity, so as to arm the children’s souls with knowledge.