Reaching China’s ‘left behind’ children

Win #14 in ACTAsia’s 20 Years, 20 Wins series is about reaching China’s ‘left-behind’ children – an estimated 61 million of them growing up in rural villages while their parents work in the cities. ACTAsia has built more than one route in: camps that travel to where they are, classes that reach where no road does, and, increasingly, schools that come looking for the curriculum on their own. #14 of 20

One of the many difficult effects of being a left-behind child is growing up without the person who’d normally teach you empathy, patience, and how to be part of a community. Many are raised by grandparents, if anyone. ACTAsia founder and CEO Pei Su has written about watching this gap show up in classrooms: children who are withdrawn, overly reliant on their phones, and disconnected from the nature around them, because no one has had the time or the tools to teach them otherwise.

Camps that meet children where they are

Since 2013, ACTAsia has run Caring for Life summer camps for rural left-behind children, starting in Qinghai, Ningxia and Gansu and continuing through this year. The camps reach some of China’s most remote villages – places where the nearest airport is still a half-day’s travel away – and bring children hands-on lessons in empathy, animal welfare and connection to the natural world around them, alongside the kind of warmth and attention many of them rarely get day to day.

That attention is significant, as the need runs much deeper than academic gaps. Camp staff have encountered children who stop attending due to heavy obligations at home – caring for younger siblings, domestic duties or a grandparent who needs support – that had taken precedence. Part of the camps’ work is supporting these children through attuning to their contexts and helping them learn how to advocate for themselves. 

Extending the reach online

Camps can only go where staff can physically travel. For everywhere else, ACTAsia built the Hu+ Poverty Alleviation Programme, which uses internet technology to reach the most remote, side-lined children in rural China.
Local teachers step in to facilitate activities, guided remotely by ACTAsia’s own online educator, turning an internet connection into a classroom for kids too far from a Pioneer school to ever attend one in person.

Why this win matters

CFL has already reached more than 600,000 children across China, but that number can flatten an important distinction: reaching a school is not the same as reaching the children a system was never built to find. The camps and the Hu+ classes work precisely by building routes to them directly, wherever they are.

Twenty years of Caring for Life started with a simple goal: put compassion in front of every child, not just the ones easiest to reach. Win #14 shows what that goal looks like in practice: camps that travel to remote villages, with teachers and volunteers who provide care to the children to need it most, and classes that reach where no road does. 

20 Years, 20 Wins 

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