Examples of Activities & Projects

In line with its objectives and policy of promoting children’s education, ISBET produced a Handbook on Sponsorship of Children for Education. It is based on a highly successful program of sponsorship of children in India conducted for many years by an NGO named Community Aid and Sponsorship Program. The Handbook has been adapted for use anywhere in the world and gives step-by-step instruction on launching a program of this type. Copies of the Handbook are available on request along with any advice and assistance that might be needed in launching a program.

A unique approach is proving successful in enabling poor families with children to send them to school by increasing their regular incomes and by opening schools, with community self help and participation, where none were available before. A few examples of this approach are as follows:

Completed Projects

Establishment and running of a school in a slum area of Karachi, Pakistan with the assistance and direct participation of a local NGO: It was funded by the 1% Development Fund of the United Nations on the basis of a project proposal submitted by ISBET. The community served was without any school in the past and the building acquired for this school also serves as the community center.
Pupils’ mothers received training in useful skills for augmenting their family incomes.

In Bangladesh’s Magura district, a Community based Micro-credit approach has increased the incomes of a significant number of families and enabled the opening of three schools with 90 pupils to start functioning, within a few months of project activity. The opening of schools in each of the beneficiary villages was a precondition for ISBET assistance. On completion of ISBET assistance, a grant was provided by the Irish Government for replication of this experiment in a larger geographical area.

From July 1, 2002, until 2004 ISBET has provided half the funding for a project for the education and well being of 100 children of victims of HIV/AIDS in the city of Pune, India. The project was conceived by the Community Aid and Sponsorship Program (CASP), a well -known NGO in India engaged in the sponsorship for education of children in all major cities of India, and implemented by it in cooperation with the Federation for the Elimination of Leprosy. ISBET has an ongoing relationship with CASP whose Founder President Dr. S. Gokhale is an honorary member of ISBET.

Another unique and successful experiment conducted by ISBET (and popularly known as the Banana Project) has been the provision of nutritional support to poor children in the age group of 3 to 5 years by giving them one banana a day at an appointed time. The occasion is also used for imparting useful information and education to the mothers in areas like health and hygiene, nutrition, importance of education for children, household management, etc.

The first experiment was conducted in a slum area of New Delhi, India, where 100 children were provided a banana a day for sixty days. The results of this modest input were so encouraging that it was decided to launch a second experimental project on Nutritional Support to Poor Children in Firozabad, India was conducted with the help of Child Fund India to provide 500 children between the age of 3 and 5, one banana a day as supplementary nutrition under the supervision of the local project staff, over a period of five months in the year 2001. Funding for this project was mainly through a grant from the United Nations Women's Guild of Geneva supplemented by ISBET's own resources. This second project was completed on 30^th September 2001 with outstanding results.

Another phase of the Banana project was launched in Firozabad, India, on June 1, 2002, with the help of Child Fund India covering 500 children over a period of 12 months. On the basis of lessons learnt in the previous two experiments, involvement of women’s self-help groups supported by Child Fund India under a different project. Regular participation and involvement of a local child specialist is also included, and extended coverage of the same children for a period of 12 months allowed a more reliable study of the benefits of nutritional support in the form of bananas. Results were highly positive.

Ongoing Projects

Having completed more than 10 years, ISBET membership, which consists of mostly retired ILO and other U.N. officials, has declined considerably. For the last few years it has focused on supporting informal schools (for up to 200 children) under the Education for All Campaign in India. Such schools run through NGOs helped placed out of school children to be placed back in the formal mainstream of education. It now intends to help participating NGOs involved in the implementation of India’s new legislation on the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education.