The Ephraim Foundation
INTERNATIONAL
Empowering Rural Communities in Sri Lanka
A village child already has a seat in a classroom. What she doesn't have is a meal before she sits down, or the paid tutoring that quietly decides who passes the national exams. We run the centre in her village that closes both gaps.
$10
The Ephraim Foundation International
The Root Cause
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The gap isn't the school. It's everything around it.
Sri Lanka has near-universal literacy and free public education through university. Access to a classroom was never the barrier here.
Two other things are. After the 2022 economic collapse, food prices in rural villages outran what families earn, and children started arriving at school hungry — unable to use the seat they'd been given. At the same time, the exams that decide a child's future are effectively gated behind private tuition classes. Families who can pay, pass. Families who can't, watch their children fall behind a year at a time.
It doesn't take much to break the cycle. It takes someone in the village, week after week, with food and a lesson plan.
She arrives hungry
and can't use the class she's sitting in
She falls behind
with no paid tutor to help her catch up
She leaves school early
for work, or for marriage
The village repeats itself
and the next generation starts here again
LEAD — Learning, Education, Access, Development — is a single room in a single village, open after school.
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Children come in and eat. They get help with the work their exams will actually test. They get weighed and checked through our children's clinic, so we know whether a child is genuinely growing and not just showing up.
Some centres run daily. Others run once a week. Each village gets the schedule it can actually sustain — and each one costs $222 a month to operate.
Makandura
Badalgama
Matale
Ganepolla
14 Smaller Villages
