Help children to break cycle of poverty, foundation urges

“The best approach to reducing the wealth gap is by educating children, yet many children in rural Taiwan cannot even afford to pay their tuition fees,” CWLF Board Member Alicia Wang (王育敏) pointed out in a press conference held yesterday in Taipei.

According to the CWLF, 43.9 percent of the fourth through sixth graders surveyed in rural areas faced situations where they were unable to pay tuition fees; 17.9 percent took home their school-provided lunches; and 8 percent witnessed debt collectors knocking on their families' doors.

Many children from such families are raised by their grandparents, such as 12-year-old Little Hsiung (小雄). Hsiung's parents had been on the run from debt collectors since he was a baby, leaving him in the care of his grandparents, who raised him by selling recycled products. As the economy struggles and the number of people collecting scraps rises, the family now struggles to survive, and with the fact that his grandparents are aging, Hsiung is in desperate need of help.

There are countless cases that mirror Hsiung's situation said Hope Chiu (邱靖惠), chief deputy coordinator of the CWLF Office of Research and Development. While 32.3 percent of the surveyed rural families are grandparents-children households and 17.4 percent of the children are from single-parent households. Both are far from ideal structures in which children should grow up in, she stated.

Children raised in underprivileged rural families like these are often faced with both financial and upbringing troubles, Chiu said, emphasizing that once these problems disrupt a child's education, it would be difficult for him or her to break out of the poverty cycle.

To help these underprivileged children, the CWLF and the Chinatrust Commercial Bank are jointly promoting “Lighting the Spark of Life” (點燃生命之火), a fundraising movement dedicated to supporting underprivileged children in rural Taiwan.

For more information, please visit http://www.chinatrust.org.tw.

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