In order to help reducing the drop out rates on girls in Indonesia, Taman Bacaan Pelangi launched a new program, named the “Girls’ Scholarship Program” on 21 April 2021. As the program name implies, it is a scholarship program for adolescent girls and currently we focus it in Eastern Indonesia. Our first target areas are Ende and Nagekeo Regencies which are located on the mainland of Flores, East Nusa Tenggara.
The beneficiaries of the Girls’ Scholarship Program are students in 8th or 9th grade of junior high school from underprivileged family who ranked in the top 10 in their class. This scholarship will continue to be awarded until they graduate from senior high school.
The selection process consists of several stages, which are: 1) document assessment stage, such as report cards, parental income statements, and other supporting documents; 2) Interview stage, where each student is interviewed by 3 judges, which consists of, a representative of the Department of Education in each district, a representative of community leader, and a representative of Rainbow Reading Gardens; 3) House Visit, where the judges visit the candidates’ houses to check, double-check, and validate the data obtained from documents and during interviews.
After a series of rigorous selection processes, 20 students have been selected as the scholarship recipients, with details of 8 students from Ende Regency and 12 from Nagekeo Regency. With 3 students who will continue to the SMA/SMK (senior high school) stage and 17 students move up to class 9th grade at SMP for the 2021/2022 school year.
As an update, we have started the process of providing scholarships for the tuition fees and other school fees for the 2021/2022 Academic Year. Scholarship payments are made directly to the school, which includes tuition fees for one year, committee fees, book purchases, uniform fees, etc.
Other than that, Rainbow Reading Gardens will also provide a series of capacity building workshops for the scholarship recipients. The workshops aim at improving their life skilss and soft-skills, ranging from communication skills, financial literacy skills, digital literacy, and many more.
We are open for those of you who wish to sponsor these bright-mind students! You can “adopt” them by providing them with the scholarships. Please contact us for more details!