Of the over 1.3 billion people who live in China, it is estimated 800 million are in rural areas. Therefore, the rural prosperity is important to maintain a harmonious society in China, and education is always fundamental to the development. However, income inequality in the countryside and cities has led to an educational gap in China's rural areas. Given lack of sufficient education resources, rural students find difficult to receive quality education, leading to the harsh reality that rural students have much less opportunities to access higher education and then job markets. Statistics show that more than 70 percent of students from China's major cities go to college while less than 5 percent of students from rural areas do.

Promoting rural education  

In the hope of providing better quality education for rural students, Cargill launched "Cargill Cares Rural Education Program" under partnership with China Children and Teenagers' Fund (CCTF) in 2008. With Cargill's over $1 million donation and long term volunteering efforts of employees, the program is reaching more than 14,000 rural students per year. The program comprises two parts ?a school renovation/ construction project that helps improve hardware learning facilities in rural areas and a school library project that help rural kids access to more learning resources. To date, Cargill has helped 21 rural primary schools in China to renovate or build school facilities through the school construction project. On May 12 2008 when the earthquake hit Wenchuan Sichuan province, a rural school in the quake-impacted area that was built with Cargill's support safeguarded over 200 students from the disaster. 

In October this year, Cargill kicked off the library project named "Cargill Cares Library". 10 schools were selected in this project, and each school will receive a set of library facilities valued RMB 150,000, including 12,500 extracurricular books and auxiliary teaching facilities like bookshelves, desks, chairs and projectors. The books are carefully selected by the CCTF's education professionals and experts.

Lianshan Yonghe Primary School, located at a remote mountainous area in Foshan Guangdong province was one of the 10 beneficiary rural schools. The school has great challenge in providing sufficient reading resources for all the 500 students due to long-term shortage of funds. Most of students come from poor families which could not afford buying extracurricular books for their kids. "Teaching what it is on the textbooks is far from enough in this age of information, our students have scarce resources to learn the world outside?said the school principal Huang Li.

"Cargill hopes that with this support we could help make a difference to those rural kids' life," said Song Guolong, General Manager of Cargill Animal Nutrition Foshan plant, "the support to rural education is Cargill's long-term commitment to the communities.". The Cargill Cares Library now becomes a major source for the students to gain knowledge besides that of textbooks and reading is more fun for them since they always could find something new from the books.

Except Foshan, other 9 Cargill locations in China have built libraries in local community schools, including Machong in Guangdong, Chongqing in western China, Zhenjiang in eastern China and Songyuan in northern China. Another 9 locations will join in the following years.

Involving employees

Cargill's support for rural education is far beyond donation, it is much more appreciated by its community partners for the long term volunteering efforts. Over the last 6 years, under cooperation of the NGO partner Junior Achievement, Cargill employees have volunteered to teach primary school students fundamental of international trade and economics in more than 20 rural areas around the country, benefiting more than 3,000 students per year. With this volunteering effort, rural students are able to easily understand the world's economic development, which are usually not taught by school teachers in class.

In China, the social and emotional capacity development for rural is challenge in rural education, due to lack of qualified teaching resources. For years, Cargill employees have been actively involving in volunteering service to help develop rural kids' social, emotional and cognitive thinking capacities. In Nantong Jiangsu province, under partnership with an international NGO Right-to-Play, Cargill employees help migrant workers' kids develop social capacity through a series of play-and-learn activities that are conducted on a monthly basis. Those kids who have migrated into urban areas with their parents find themselves difficult to fit into local communities. In Wenchuan Sichuan province and Yushu Qinghai province, where both were severely affected by earth-quake, Cargill employees work closely with NGO partner to provide long-term emotional and psychological support for local primary school students.