If you are poor and uneducated in Myanmar your prospects for employment and a chance to improve your life are zero. Even worse than that, you can be preyed upon by child traffickers for the purposes of organ theft! Through the support of Essendon Rotary and a Rotary District Foundation Grant, some children from a Yangon slum will get the opportunity to learn practical skills leading to gainful employment.
A vocational organisation, the Step In Step Up Academy (SISU), in Myanmar, prepares local youth for entry level jobs. Its training programs offer students from impoverished, slum, squatter, housing areas who have left school at a very young age with basic education and no skills. In co-operation with SISU, the Rotary Club of Essendon’s Padauk Program, a Rotary Foundation District 9800 Grant and the Rotary Club of Yangon, a AUD38,000, a funded educational program will provide over 30 students with vocational training, and better yet, the opportunity to be employed in meaningful jobs which they would not be able to consider without this important training.
The program is named for Padauk, a suburb in Yangon. It is a mixture of an expensive housing compounds surrounding a golf course and, in contrast, a deplorable, impoverished slum of over half a million people.
In late November 2024, five Essendon Rotarians travelled to Myanmar to visit the training academy, meet the students selected, the SISU staff and teachers of the Padauk program which will run from late November 2024 to December 2025.