Indonesia

The situation for children

The conflict following East Timor’s 1999 referendum drove thousands of families from their homes and over the border into West Timor, where around 28,000 still live in resettlement sites. Tensions run high between these refugee families and local communities due to poverty and the sharing of limited resources. The large influx of refugee children placed enormous pressure on neighbouring schools, which are under-resourced and overcrowded. Many teachers have as many as 100 children in their classroom. Overcrowded classrooms, ineffective teaching methods and ethnic tension amongs students have forced children to drop out of school.

Helping East Timor refugees in West Timor

Save the Children is helping to integrate children into mainstream schools by building outreach classrooms for the extra children and setting up school committees that include parents and leaders from both the refugee sites and local villages. We also work with teachers at 45 schools in the border region and education authorities to encourage more child-friendly teaching methods, reduce corporal punishment and improve learning.

Participating schools report an increase in regular school attendance, an increase in children’s academic achievement and improved relations between refugee and local children. By engaging children in activity-based learning that requires everyone to interact, ethnic tolerance between children from diverse backgrounds has improved.

Indian Ocean tsunami

Save the Children continues to assist children and families affected by one of the world's most devastating natural disasters, that killed hundreds of thousands of people in South Asia. Our teams in the affected areas of India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia are helping to rebuild local livelihoods as part of a five-year plan for the region.

For more information, visit our dedicated website .