Publisher's Synopsis
Dr. Shahid Ahmed has devised a very low-cost model to educate the poor and applied that to tens of thousands of children in the slums of Bangladesh. This book tells the gripping story of his five-year struggle of working with the slum communities to form an educational system. He describes the uphill battle of child labor, early marriage, and resistance to education that frustrated his mission. His trials and tribulations, success and failures, and moments of hope and despair dig deep into roots of the problems. An estimated one billion people are living in urban slums, and the number is growing. Some 50-100 million little children under the age of 5 who will never go to school in their lives are living there. These children will mostly grow up uneducated, the social and economic consequences of which are devastating. With the mission to alleviate poverty, the book describes a startling system of education that emerged, costing one dollar per child per month. This system has so far resulted in about 50,000 child-year of schooling. Will this model enable educating the masses of the poor to eradicate poverty? The book provides a tantalizing hope that will grab your attention.Dr. Shahid Ahmed is President of PITC Institute in Wyncote, Pennsylvania for the last 18 years. He founded the nonprofit, DoPeace, in 2014. He has a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa; and an MBA from The Wharton School, the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
