Funding a better future for rural education

Students at Hongban Elementary School used to bring both a schoolbag and a woven bag into the classroom, the latter filled with potatoes, corn cobs and charcoal to make lunch at school.

But financial aid to the school in Southwest China's Guizhou province has now changed the school's dining arrangements for good. A kitchen with refrigerators and disinfection equipment now helps to provide students with nutritious meals.

For several years, government bodies and NGOs have been making efforts to help fund and improve schools in poor rural regions. Nutritional programs have improved the diets of rural students in half the country since 2011, with the central government spending almost 160 billion yuan ($25 billion) on 134,000 schools.

"China's expenditure on students with difficulties reached 140 billion yuan in 2017, a 62-percent increase from 2012," says Zheng Fuzhi, assistant education minister. "The government has allocated 3 billion yuan for educational poverty relief in regions of extreme poverty this year."

And increased budget and favorable polices are also helping to enhance the quality of teaching. Since 2013, living allowances have been provided to rural teachers.

As of May 2017, over 1.3 million teachers in extremely impoverished areas received an average of 2,400 yuan, and in some cases as much as 6,000 yuan.

In 2006, a teaching program was put in place to encourage university graduates to teach in rural primary and junior high schools.

Graduates spend three years in rural schools and favorable policies help them restart their careers after they complete their teaching posts.

Currently, this program covers close to 1,000 counties in 22 provinces, and the ministry plans to add 10,000 teachers in 2018.