In today’s world, poverty still affects the lives of people from developing countries and creates a generational cycle of poverty that doesn’t end within one generation. But, believe it or not, STEM education can help to solve the problem of poverty within the world by providing children with the right kind of knowledge. Let’s further explore how STEM+A education can create a difference within the world!
What is Generational Poverty?
Even though we are living in the 21st century, unfortunately poverty and income inequality are still a part of our lives, especially within the developing countries. Poverty affects a huge part of people’s lives and doesn’t limit itself to one specific generation as once it starts affecting a certain group of people, it generally continues from generation to generation. Poverty can show its face in many ways, whether it be in the form of lack of food, shelter or lack of education. Even though the lack of education seems to be the most bearable one when compared to lack of food and shelter, lack of education can create a domino effect in people’s lives.
A UNESCO study shows that if all of the people within the low-income or developing countries had simple reading skills, close to 171 million people could have escaped poverty. By creating a problem of generational poverty, lack of education starts a domino effect between generations. Generational poverty refers to the situation when a family experiences poverty for more than two generations. While one generation doesn’t have access to high quality education that could have provided them with high paying, qualified jobs, they end up having low paying, unreliable jobs. Yet, it doesn’t end up with their own generation. When these people have children, as their parents wouldn’t have the resources to provide them with a high-quality education that would pave the way for high paying jobs for them, these children will follow the footsteps of their parents and end up having low paying jobs as well. And this will create a cycle of poverty and will continue from generation to generation until one parent stops the cycle and provides their children with the education that the 21st century requires. And that kind of education is the STEM+A education in our world.
How can STEM+A Education Help to End Poverty?
STEM+A education provides children with the abilities that the 21st century world requires them to have. As we always say, we are living in the age of technology, so science and technology is and will be part of both our professional and daily lives today and in the upcoming decades. Whether they want to pursue a career in a STEM-related field or not, children need to have the basic skills that STEM education provides, no matter how unrelated the field they want to work in could be from a field in science, technology, mathematics and engineering. Like we mentioned earlier, education can pave the way for upward mobility for children by giving them a chance to acquire higher paying jobs. If we want to narrow this claim a bit further, we can say that STEM education can reduce or entirely end poverty by helping them improve their living standards.
When one generation manages to get a proper STEM education that would make the children of that generation more acquainted with technology and science, this would definitely increase their chances of finding a more qualified and high-paying job than the generations that came before them. And that would break the cycle of generational poverty that is the main reason behind the lack of education that most children experience, especially in rural and developing regions of the world.
What is the Role of Technology in Poverty Reduction?
In today’s world, technology stands against poverty. But how can we manage to get more people to take such proactive measures like helping their kids acquire a proper STEM education that makes technology a part of their lives? The answer is easy: with the help of Ed-Tech and Tech4Good companies and their products. Even though most schools, including the public schools, try to shape their curriculum to be more STEM oriented, affording to enroll children in schools that has a specific curriculum for STEM education is still rather expensive. Companies that develop applications and produce kits to substitute the STEM education on an extracurricular level are the best solution for that problem. Sending your child to a private school with a STEM curriculum might be expensive but compared to that, making use of such applications and kits to make your child warm up to STEM and technology and have a solid STEM foundation that would help them to have higher paying jobs is much more affordable.
In the age of technology children should have the 21st century skills at their hand to be able to provide solutions to today’s problems. Twin offers kids to break this cycle of poverty – more specifically generational poverty- with its application and STEM kits. Offering kids a chance to get a STEM education on a more affordable level, Twin helps to make education what it should be: a way to bring equality into the world. Being a strong proponent of a double-winged education for children —meaning raising individuals with a qualified background both academically and morally—Twin helps children in developing countries to have access to science and technology by backing up projects such as World Science Movement. Being a social responsibility project, the World Science Movement aims to help children with disadvantaged backgrounds that suffer from the consequences of generational poverty from all around the world acquire 21st century STEM skills.
With such information at hand, we can say that a quality education, more specifically a STEM oriented education that meets the standards of the 21st century, can help to end the generational poverty cycle that is the number one reason behind educational poverty and lack of quality education and consequently quality careers for children. Poverty feeds on inequality and if we manage to end this cycle of inequality by breaking it with the help of a quality STEM oriented education that would raise problem solving individuals with a critical thinking mindset, we can break the barriers that confines people to living with low standards and working for low paying jobs that are far behind what they should be and what they deserve. Making children have access to quality education being one of UN’s Sustainable Development Goals to be achieved by the year of 2030, Twin helps to make those goals come true by harnessing science and technology for poverty reduction and sustainable development!
