School attendance affected by monsoon rains in Bangladesh

For 10–year–old Yasmin and her eight–year–old brother Rabbi, nothing will keep them from their studies—not even this year’s worse than average monsoon rains. Each day they make the perilous 20–minute journey to their newly relocated school in Holan, a bustling community of 2,000 inhabitants northeast of Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital. “I’ve never missed a day,” Yasmin said. But many of her classmates at the Holan government primary school are not so lucky. “There has been a 20 percent drop in attendance,”said Nasir Uddin, one of four teachers at the school. According to the government’s latest estimates, over 10 million people were affected and 447 were killed as of August 20. And while Bangladesh, a flood–prone nation of over 150 million inhabitants, emerges from some of the worst flooding in recent years, its impact on the country’s primary school sector has yet to be fully assessed. Read more at IRIN News.