United World Schools

Empowering our youth through education. As part of our Organic & Fairtrade Coffee & Tea sales, Copper Branch is donating a portion to United World Schools. UWS is an incredible organization dedicated to improving education for some of the world’s poorest children. They provide a free basic education to children living in remote and marginalized communities. “We teach the unreached.”

UWS Khe Krom continues to be at the heart of the village community. One of the best things has been the development of the community teachers and the arrival of a new Government teacher. The new teacher is really keen to ensure students understand about hygiene and also about ways to vary their diet and grow vegetables. This is such an important area and we really hope that we will see a big increase in life expectancy over the next 10 years, directly resulting from the work he is doing.

One issue we are facing is students being drawn into working in the rubber plantations. The work is extremely long and hard, with young boys having to live at the plantation with grown men in a close and often scary environment. The students are drawn to the job as a way of supplementing the family income to ensure that they have food if the rice crop is insufficient. The pay is very good, even for the young boys. They each receive around US$3 per day, which is comparable to the local teachers in your UWS School. To make sure that students going out to work don’t fall behind we have been running additional lessons at night time. We also offer students the chance to take resources like library books to their homes so they can practice their reading.