One scarf, One smile
Our project for education in Cambodia
The social project that Krama Heritage endorses could not limit itself to the sole textile industry. It indeed appeared to us fundamental to be able to bring a concrete and meaningful help to Cambodia’s new generations thanks to education. Acting in Cambodia for twenty-five years in favour of the underprivileged children to accompany them from misery to a job and taking care every year of more than 6,500 children in programs developed in order to bring a complete answer to their needs, it is the NGO For a Child’s Smile (Pour un Sourire d’Enfant - PSE) that we have decided to support : that is the project One scarf, One smile. Thus, for every Krama Heritage purchased, you offer up to two days of school to a child taken care of at the PSE Remedial school. PSE is an exemplary NGO of which action we are admirers, that we are proud to support and to which we are very attached. The educative model it has built, on top of producing admirable results in its centers, beams today in Cambodia as a model to be followed and which is followed. PSE’s story 25 years of war and a terrible genocide left Cambodia shattered. Everything had been destroyed including necessary support networks and foundations. The poor lived in extreme moral, physical and material destitution. And the children are the main victims: their future was limited to scavenging on rubbish dumps or wandering the streets with all the associated dangers. Christian and Marie-France des Pallières, the founders, have lived and worked in Cambodia since the beginning of their action in the country. In October 1995, whilst on a humanitarian mission in Cambodia, they discovered the horror of the municipal rubbish dump of Phnom Penh. There, hundreds of children lived and worked, feeding themselves on the waste. They immediately decided they had « to do something » to answer the children’s simple demand : one meal a day and go to school. The story of Christian and Marie-France, affectionately nick-named Papy and Mamie by PSE’s children, was brought to the screen in 2016 in the documentary-movie Les Pépites (Little Gems), directed by Xavier de Lauzanne. It was released a few days after the passing of Christian in September 2016. In 2000, the association received the French Republic’s Human Rights Prize. It is PSE’s Remedial School that we have chosen to support by taking one day of school financed as the measure of our social impact. For every Krama Heritage you are buying, you are offering up to two days of school to a child taken care of at PSE’s Remedial School. Thus : • For every Krama Heritage purchased on our online store up to €75, you are offering one day of school to a child taken care of at PSE’s Remedial School. • For every Krama Heritage purchased on our online store for a value above €75, you are offering two days of school to a child taken care of at PSE’s Remedial School. If you are buying a Krama Heritage at one of our partnering stores’: • For every Krama Heritage purchased at one of our partnering stores’ up to €75, you are offering half-a-day of school to a child taken care of at PSE’s Remedial School. • For every Krama Heritage purchased at one of our partnering stores’ for a value above €75, you are offering one day of school to a child taken care of at PSE’s Remedial School. Our solidarity one-for-one model rests indeed upon the sales we make, and thus upon our retail price in the case of our partnering shops. To this day, you have offered and so we have financed 8,101 days of school to the children taken care of at PSE’s Remedial School : it’s a great start we can collectively be proud of ! Starting from 2021, we will be expliciting even more the figures of our support to PSE by adding the detail of : our impact for every school year, the number of pupils sent to school per class thanks to the One scarf, One smile project and the progression of these figures from one year to the other. Most of the children welcomed at PSE’s Remedial School have never been to school or have accumulated a very important school backwardness. They can’t manage to follow the classes at the public school and are often in a school failure position, ending up dropping out of school. From the onstart of its action, PSE set up a method of accelerated teaching for children that have been out of school for too long and too old to return to the classic school system. That is the school remedial program, which allows children to study in one year the program of two years. Thus, in 4 years of schooling, they leap from the first year of primary to the year before graduating from junior high, the last year being taught in one classic year. Based on lively and interactive classes, the method produces impressive results and is today recognized by the Cambodian Ministry of Education, which already put it in place in some primary public schools. In close collaboration with the Ministry, PSE already led its setting up in the public schools of 5 provinces in Cambodia. It will benefit to 6,000 children per annum.
