Japan's EDF has helped educate many thousands of Asean children
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EDUCATIONAL PROJECT GREW FROM FOUNDER'S FRIENDSHIP WITH THAI FROM THE NORTHEAST TAKEHIKO KAMBAYASHI
FOR TERUMASA AKIO, the altruistic project started with a visit to a rural Thai village more than a quarter of a century ago.
While Akio was enchanted by the idyllic landscape and innocent children, he was astonished at the economic disparity between the northeastern village and the country’s capital Bangkok in 1987.
“I learned almost no children moved up to junior high school,” recalled Akio, founder and chairman of EDF International (The Education for Development Foundation International).
Since 1987, the Bangkok-based charity has helped provide educational opportunities for nearly 400,000 disadvantaged children in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar.
In the 1980s, a Thai student from the village who was studying at the time in Tokyo wanted Akio to see his homeland. The two had come to know each other through a home-stay programme in northern Japan established by Akio.
In the Thai village, a mother met with the Thai student and implored him for help in sending her daughter to junior high school. The girl excelled at school, she told him.
The student decided on the spot to help the family. Akio also wanted to do something, so he collected 410,000 yen (Bt117 million) from 41 people in Japan at 10,000 yen apiece to enable 41 children in the village to attend a Thai junior high school.
Some of the donors later asked Akio whether the money had been truly used for Thai children. He went back to the village to make sure.
The donations were indeed spent on the children’s education, Akio learned.
However, when Akio met with some of the students who had received money, they tearfully pleaded with him to also help their friends, who would have to go to big cities to work, because they needed to support their families.
Those pleas led him to bolster his efforts to raise donations, he recalled. And he was able to round up enough funding for 600 children.
It was a time when very few Japanese were aware of charity or volunteer work.
However, Akio was confronted with something unexpected in the northeastern region of Thailand. Too few children showed an interest in advancing to junior high school.
Akio was told that those children put helping their parents first in their plans.
“They did not think they would be doing their filial duty if they went to junior high school. So I told them ‘If you go to junior high school, you would be able to give more help to your parents and contribute to your community as well,’ ” he said.
“Then they raised their hands all together, calling out, ‘I want to go to junior high,’ ” recalls the soft-spoken man, who wears a neatly trimmed grey goatee.
In the third year, the amount of donations increased 10-fold. EDF was able to send about 6,000 children to junior high school.
The charity has also helped build schools, founded libraries, provided educational materials, performed health education and offered teacher training programmes in the five Southeast Asian countries.
Before his deep involvement in Southeast Asia, Akio founded Exchange: Japan to promote Japanese-language education at universities in Canada and the United States, and helped set up initial classes at about 150 of them.
Akio “has a very strong belief in his work,” Natsue Yamamoto, a long EDF supporter, said.
Yamamoto has supported children in Thailand, Myanmar and Laos through EDF for two decades.
Takao Akaishi, an associate professor at the school of medicine at Niigata University, said he started to support Southeast Asia through EDF a quarter of a century ago after visiting the region as part of his research.
Akaishi then strongly felt he wanted to do something for the region.
Akio “established a solid base for his activities and understood local situations,” he said.
About 97 per cent of donations that EDF’s Japan office receive come from individual donors across the country, it said.
The Thai children later gave something back to Japan. When the country was struck by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, the Thais raised funds and donated them to the disaster-stricken regions via EDF in Bangkok.
Akio was so grateful that he drove to Rikuzentakata, one of the hardest-hit areas, 400km north of Tokyo, to take a donation to a local junior high school that had long supported Thai children through EDF.
Akio highly values such efforts in solving humanitarian problems.
“Individual initiatives are more efficient than government moves,” he said.
“Unlike in the West, the size of civil society organisations in Asia is still small,” Akio said. “I believe their growth will contribute to social advancement in the region in the 21st century.”
