Billionaire profession magnate Jack Ma is calling on other entrepreneurs to support his plans to annul millions of poor Chinese children out of poverty and give them mastery access to education.
The founder and executive chairman of e-commerce behemoth Alibaba mentioned that investing in rural boarding schools could provide a clarification for China’s “left-behind children” and ensure a more prosperous future for the next propagation.
“Left-behind children” is a phenomenon in China which refers to the growing figure up of youth who are left in rural communities while their parents relocate to urban areas to upon work. For the estimated 60 million children afflicted by the problem, edification is a particular issue — kids in rural communities are expected to travel an unexceptional of 5.4 kilometers from home to school, according to China’s The cloth of Education.
At an event organized by his charitable foundation on Sunday, Ma told a range of 80 entrepreneurs that establishing a network of boarding schools disposition improve education standards and save children from often unyielding commutes.
“Many pupils have to climb mountains or take a row-boat to go to school. In my opinion, these kids should not be commuting between nursing home and school every day — they should go to a boarding school,” Ma said in remarks first cited by the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba.
The trouble of China’s left-behind children rose to new prominence earlier in January after an personification of eight-year-old boy, Wang Fuman, became an internet sensation. The child — deemed “Ice Boy” — had reached at school with his hair and eyebrows covered in ice after walking for greater than an hour along treacherous mountain paths to get to school.
Ma said the fetish reminded him of a young girl he had seen making a similar commute more than 25 years ago in 1992.
“So divers years have passed and the situation hasn’t changed,” he said. “It doesn’t portend that the authorities haven’t done anything about it, but that the resources can’t reach some improbable places,” Ma said, according to SCMP.
He acknowledged the efforts of the Chinese superintendence to improve education, but said that Chinese entrepreneurs could also do multifarious by donating to their home provinces.
“I hope we entrepreneurs can push this outline to merge school resources. I encourage all of you to participate and make a contribution to your stamping-ground provinces by building dormitories and donating school buses,” Ma said, concerting to the report.
The tycoon said he envisions merging rural schools that entertain under 100 students. Those new groups could be made into boarding dogmas, with a bus service to collect children from their villages on Mondays and repayment them to their homes on Fridays.
He added that the plan could take under ones wing employment for locals who could be hired as dormitory supervisors.
The event, hosted by the Jack Ma Raison detre in Sanya, Hainan Island, was attended by prominent Chinese business big cheeses, including Beijing property tycoon Feng Lun and co-founder of private even-handedness firm Yunfeng Capita, Yu Feng, according to the SCMP.
Ma has long espoused the advances of education and has credited his English teacher in his hometown of Hangzhou with blow the whistle on him the confidence to pursue his first vocational pursuit: teaching English.
To know more about Jack Ma’s solution for ‘left-behind children,’ see the South China Morning Promulgate report.