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(Xinhua)
Updated: 2007-08-24 14:04

Project Hope has helped more than 3.04 million dropouts return to school across China since it was launched 18 years ago.

A total of 13,285 Project Hope schools have been built with financing from the scheme in the country's far-flung and mountainous regions, according to Gu Xiaojin, Party secretary with the China Youth Development Foundation.

China launched Project Hope on October 30, 1989 to pool donations to help impoverished rural school children to complete primary school education. Since its inauguration, Project Hope has received more than 3.5 billion yuan (US$462.5 million) in donation from domestic and overseas sources including individuals, government organizations and major transnational corporations.

Guizhou, a land-locked province in Southwest China and one of the poorest regions in the country, has received 350 million yuan in donation since Project Hope was initiated in the province in 1990, allowing it to build 1,339 primary schools, said Wang Fuyu, deputy secretary of Guizhou Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

The province has also used the donations to bring more than 135,000 dropouts back to school and to train more than 3,100 teachers, alongside with improved conditions at Project Hope schools in the past 17 years.

China has been working on building a mechanism which guarantees compulsory rural education funding. The mechanism is designed to ensure that the cost of rural education is covered by central and local finances.

Last year, China exempted students in rural areas of western China from tuition and miscellaneous fees during the nine-year compulsory education. The exemptions will be expanded to central and eastern regions this year.

The move will relieve the financial burden on 150 million rural households with school-age children, who make up nearly 80 percent of the country's primary and junior middle school students.

Gu Xiaojin, who is also deputy head of the council for China Youth Development Foundation, said donations of Project Hope would be used to finance construction of more schools adjacent to near pupils' homes and to upgrade existing schools in the new stage.