Who We Are And What We Do

Background: The Situation on the Border

Since the overthrow of the 1990 election in Myanmar (formerly Burma), and during the years of turmoil that followed, Thailand has received thousands of refugees from Myanmar’s internal political and ethnic wars, along with over 3 million hungry Myanmar migrant workers. This refugee and migrant population includes hundreds of thousands of children who also entered or were born in Thailand.

Unable to attend Thai schools due to many constraints, these Myanmar children went to ad hoc Burmese primary and secondary schools set up in refugee camps and near the fields and factories where their parents worked. Staffed by Myanmar migrant teachers and activists, funded by international NGOs, religious groups, and local CBOs, these schools did their best under trying circumstances to develop curricula and provide teacher training for the migrant teachers. Children would appear unexpectedly at the schools whenever their parents arrived in Thailand looking for quasi-legal work, and would leave just as suddenly when their families had to move on, for so many different reasons. Education is a challenging task under these conditions, but, motivated by the vision of bringing hope and a future to so many disadvantaged children, the schools did their job.

The Boarding High School for Orphans and Homeless (BHSOH) was one of these schools. Started in 1999 by Khaing Oo Maung, a Myanmar high school principal who had fled to the border with his students when the Myanmar military began suppressing the student uprising in 1988, they rented a small house and took in some 30 children of the local factory workers and farm workers. The school’s reputation grew, and by 2024 it had over 500 students, 20 teachers, and a new campus in the sugarcane fields outside the town of Mae Sot.

Developing a Higher Education Program

But even when the students graduated from these informal border schools, their future was still uncertain. The graduation certificate that they received was not certified by any government; neither the Thai nor the Myanmar officials were interested in working with these informal schools. So there was no program available that was capable of preparing the best qualified students to get a recognized international high school certificate and apply for higher paying jobs or even university scholarships.

To address this growing educational gap in the migrant and refugee communities, in 2007, U Than Htut, a well-known Myanmar political activist, established the Minmahaw Education Foundation (MEF). The MEF adapted its curriculum from the ICFC program in Chiang Mai, which had been preparing local Burmese students to take the US General Education Development exam (GED). Recognized and funded by the Child’s Dream Foundation, MEF sent its first students to Bangkok to take the US GED exam in 2009, and 8 out of 9 students passed the exam on their first try.

To handle the rush of students now wanting to attend the newly-renamed Minmahaw Higher Education Program (MHEP), Than Htut added second one-year program, now called Minmahaw School (MS), funded by its own volunteer teachers, to provide language and academic training to those who did not qualify for the GED program. Today MHEP takes 30 students each year, out of an applicant base of over 300, and hundreds of graduates have already completed their university degrees. MS has been equally successful with an annual intake of 40-50 students, which is also always oversubscribed. Minmahaw has become the model for other GED programs in the border area.

Legally Thai: The Education for Friendship Foundation

To deliver a quality education for the migrant students is a benefit to both countries. Myanmar workers and their families have become essential to the Thai economy. Tak Province, the rural border province where Mae Sot – and the majority of Burmese workers – are located, is among the highest per capita GDP provinces in the country. Considering the ASEAN economic integration policies, and the Special Economic Zone planned for the Mae Sot-Myawaddy border area, trained Myanmar migrant students can provide the crucial bilingual-bicultural labor force needed for border development projects.

To stabilize their educational programs, the Minmahaw-BHSOH group decided to establish a government-registered charitable Thai foundation which could provide a legal existence and a fundraising center for their schools. Thus, in 2013, the Education for Friendship Foundation (EFF) (in Thai: การศึกษาเพื่อมิตรภาพ – “kansuksar pheua mitraphap”) was created. According to the EFF founding documents, our purpose is to educate and train migrant workers and their families, including teaching Thai language and laws, and to build good relations between the migrants and the Thai people.

To accomplish this, EFF must empower the new generation of refugee and migrant students on the Thai- Myanmar border to be perceptive about the world, to have confidence in their abilities, to strive towards higher education, to compete internationally with their contemporaries, and to have a strong personal commitment to help advance Myanmar’s democratization and peace process. We believe that by providing a good primary, secondary, and pre-university education to refugee and migrant students who show a commitment to their ethnic communities, we will encourage a grassroots movement towards economic and social development where it is most needed.