KUALA LUMPUR: Fifteen-year-old Muhammad Shahurin Sohri is the fifth of 10 siblings. Every year, his parents struggle to find enough money to pay for their school expenses.
His mother is a housewife and his father the only breadwinner. There is a roof over their heads and food on the table, but precious little for anything else, even staples like uniforms and schoolbooks.
Basic necessities for the family are often out of reach as well.
Shahurin, who studies at SMK Segambut in Kuala Lumpur, told FMT that just getting to the store to buy uniforms and school supplies was difficult as his family does not own a car.
He also voiced hope for financial help to buy shoes, bags, exercise books and stationery for himself and his nine siblings.
But no matter how tough life gets, he said, he and his family remained positive.
“We stay together through thick and thin,” he said.
For families like Shahurin’s, social enterprise programmes like Uniforms For Us (U4U) are a boon.
U4U co-founder Fauziah Sultan spoke to FMT about the programme, which recently benefitted 350 students from seven schools in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor.
She also spoke of the Clothes of Confidence (CoC) initiative, which aims to help students from B40 or Bottom 40 families get new school uniforms at the start of the year.
Fauziah, who also runs a PR agency, began the enterprise with her colleague Azymi Wan Ahmad after noting the high number of school dropouts from the B40 group, in part because of their families’ inability to afford school expenses.
“Education is very close to my heart,” she told FMT on the sidelines of a U4U event at SMK Segambut earlier this week.
“I myself have two boys, and my youngest is a special child, so we know the struggles of getting him into the right system.”
Through the CoC initiative, she said, they began realising the size of the gap between the urban rich and urban poor.
“We realised that poor kids in the urban setting were wearing torn clothes, and that some did not even wear shoes.”
SMK Segambut principal Tengku Norlin Tengku Majid said her school was like a second home to many children from the B40 group.
“Not many of our students are from the elite group,” she said.
Norlin estimates the average cost of school supplies and uniforms to be about RM200 per child.
“And they need to get different kinds of uniforms,” she added. “There are uniforms for extra-curricular activities and for Physical Education.”
Usually, she said, children from the B40 income group would continue wearing the same uniform from Form One to Form Five.
“As long as the clothes still fit, they will wear them. They cannot afford to get new ones,” she said.
She added that programmes such as CoC by both the government and the private sector had made it easier for students who struggle to get new school gear every year.
“At least now they will not be so stressed about not having new school uniforms for the year.”
The dropout rate declined from 0.35% in 2016 to 0.29% in 2017, although studies show that children from the B40 group have high dropout rates, often due to their parents’ inability to afford school expenses.
Education Minister Maszlee Malik also attributed the dropout issue to disinterest, poverty, parental neglect, illness, disability, social problems, learning difficulties and underage marriage.