A self-funded residential school for 110 Mro children in the remote hills of Bangladesh — built entirely from bamboo, run entirely on kindness, designed entirely around preserving a culture the world is forgetting.
Nestled deep in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, where access to education is a rare privilege, Pawmum Tharkla has grown from 20 students in 2014 to a residential school for 110 children drawn from six Mro tribal villages.
The Mro community — roughly 300,000 people living where India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar meet — have no easy access to electricity, hospitals, schools, or roads. Life in the remote Bandarban hills has always been difficult. The economic and informational isolation that protected their culture for generations now threatens to erase it.
Our mission: to educate and empower the new generation of the Mro without severing them from the language, crafts, dance, and forest knowledge their ancestors spent centuries building.
What we do
Education, culture, community, environment, and health — we don't separate them. In a Mro classroom, they all belong together.
Primary education for 110 Mro students, taught in both Bangla and Krama (the Mro script). 11 months of residential and non-residential support so children from far villages can actually reach us.
Our curriculum goes beyond the national framework: life skills, agriculture, handicrafts, and self-defense are taught alongside math, science, and language. 25 students have already passed their PSC — a rare achievement in this community.
110 students · 5 teachers · 6 source villages · 38% female enrollment
The Mro have their own script — Krama — invented in the 1980s by a Mro religious teacher. It is one of the world's newest indigenous writing systems, and one of the most endangered.
At Pawmum, every child learns Krama alongside Bangla. They learn traditional Mro dance, the plung flute, and perform cultural drama drawn from oral histories. Culture is not a side program here. It is half the curriculum.
We cannot educate children well while their families are struggling for water, healthcare, or protection from harmful practices. So our work extends outward into the villages we serve.
Medical workshops. Clean water programs reaching 400+ Mro across 4 villages. Awareness campaigns that have helped reduce child marriage by 2%. Income-generating projects — handicrafts, a community market, agricultural cooperatives — giving women pathways to economic independence.
Our campus is built entirely without concrete: 120,000 bamboo poles, 20 teak trees, nearly 1,000 bunches of sungrass. Classrooms breathe with the monsoon instead of fighting it.
Our students run plastic-cleaning drives, plant trees, and study sustainable agriculture. These children will be the custodians of the Bandarban forests after us. We take that seriously.
Malaria is still a leading cause of childhood death in these hills. Safe water is not a given. A toilet — a real one — is a luxury. So we start from the ground up.
We run medical camps, teach hand-washing and hygiene, supply toothbrushes and medicine, and are currently building a set of sustainable twin-pit eco-toilets ("the PawMum Throne") designed for hillside sites without plumbing.
A child who is sick cannot learn. A school that cannot keep its children well is not really a school.
Zero concrete. 120,000 bamboo poles. 20 teak trees. Nearly 1,000 bunches of sungrass. An entire campus that breathes, bends with the monsoon, and returns gracefully to the earth when its life is done.
The architecture of Pawmum Tharkla is not an aesthetic choice. It is an ethical one. A Mro elder can look at our school and read it like a familiar sentence. Our students can help repair it. When it eventually comes down, it simply returns to the forest that raised it.
Harvested from sustainable groves, forming the framework, walls, floors and furniture.
The line we refuse to cross. Every piece is biodegradable, renewable, and of this land.
Photographs from classrooms, assembly grounds, cultural performances, and quiet moments in between.
Students honored both Bangla and Krama with flowers, flags, and handwritten letters in their own endangered script.
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Six bands, one cause. Zhir Zhir's second benefit concert brought Dhaka's music community together for the Mro children.
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Our students collected 47 bags of plastic waste from the surrounding hills — turning environmental care into a classroom lesson.
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Three-day workshop where Mro elders passed down weaving and flute-making to the next generation.
Facebook →Pawmum Tharkla runs on ৳1,395,045 a year (~USD $12,700). Every donation is visible, every taka is accounted for, and every child you help is a real person with a real name and a real future.
Covers rice, dal, vegetables, eggs, and protein for one student for 30 days in the hostel.
Give nowFull sponsorship: food, uniform, books, hostel, and teaching for one Mro child for a full school year. We send you photos and updates.
Sponsor a childA full teacher's salary for one year at Pawmum. Every extra teacher we can afford means 22 more Mro children taught with full attention.
Give nowA sustainable twin-pit, pour-flush toilet built without concrete for a hillside school that has none.
Give nowWe publish our full budget because donors deserve to see exactly where their money goes — and because transparency is the only form of trust that scales.
How to donate: Email pawmum.school@gmail.com for bKash / bank transfer / international wire details. Phone: +880 1727 323025
~ USD $12,700 — a single donor could fund our entire year.
Donations, partnerships, volunteering, press — reach us by email or the form below.
Lama, Bandarban
Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh