Yesterday, we went to the Little Swan Migrant School about one hour outside of Beijing to better understand the difficult situation of migrant workers’ children, to spend time with some children and to do ‘some painting’ to improve their study environment. This ‘Paint Your Dream’-day – that was the day’s motto – was perfectly organized by our Head of Corporate Social Responsibilty.
The Little Swan Migrant Primary School was founded in 2010 as non-profit school and provides education to 571 children from migrant workers aged between 6 and 14. While most of the children go home to their parents at night the school also provides boarding school services to a few children as they don’t have any family. As of 2013, the school offers a charity program to enroll 93 special hardship students such as orphans, children from single-parent families or physically challenged families. While the school and the teachers are doing a great job in caring for the children the condition are very tough….take a look at the pictures.
But before you go to the picture page let me give you some information about the situation of migrant workers in China: China is looking at tens of millions of migrant workers as the urbanization target is at 70% for the year 2035 starting from a baseline of 26% in 1990. However, China’s Hukou system makes moving from agricultural jobs in rural areas to non-agricultural jobs in urban areas very difficult. The Hukou system is household registration system required by law. A household registration record officially identifies a person as a resident of a specific area and includes identifying information such as name, parents, spouse, and date of birth. The pain point is that these registrations are very hard to move! This means that tens of millions of migrant workers remain registered in their home towns even if they move to the city to work. Without a ‘city’ registration though, they do not have access to state-subsidized services such as health care, education and pension payments. Currently, there are more than 478,000 migrant children in Beijing about 70% attend public schools such as the Little Swan Migrant School.
It was amazing to me how quickly we ‘bonded’ with the kids by painting a container and just kicking a football around in the schoolyard. The language barrier didn’t matter at all!
Even though I am well aware that a couple of hours of our time and a newly painted container does not sustainably alleviate the children’s situation, it might have made an impact and provided some joy for the children. It certainly had an impact on us.