Sabah’s Stateless Schoolchildren - Matakana’s Meaningful Connection
In Sabah, lies a crisis that most in other countries, and many in Malaysia itself, are completely unaware of. There, vast numbers of undocumented and stateless children are routinely denied education, healthcare, and other basic rights. Kathryn and others have set up schools especially to fill the gap and serve these children’s unique needs and with the help of unconnected.org, the internet is making an even bigger difference.
This crisis has been long in the making and most of the families have been in Malaysia for generations. Since WWII, Indonesians have moved to Sabah for work. Originally, the rubber industry dominated but now palm oil has taken over. Its harvest is one of the few agricultural processes that cannot be mechanised and the illegal immigrants can be exploited. Still, housing and more space make it a better option than staying back home.
Undocumented people over the age of 12 are routinely arrested and imprisoned in the so-called ‘Redhouse’ facility before being deported back to their country of origin. Often, they make the return journey to Malaysia barely a month later. “These people have nowhere to go,” says Kathryn, “They are born here and all their family is here”.
Because of Sabah’s geography, the immigration crisis is much more pronounced here than in more distant locations such as Borneo. Some Malaysians wouldn’t tolerate any citizenship or pandering to those who they see as ‘illegals’ and as a result, the problem remains unaddressed.
Kathryn has led an extraordinary life to this point. Originally from New Zealand, she first travelled to Asia when she signed up for an exchange programme, aged 15. Hoping to make use of her high-school French in Europe, she was instead assigned to Indonesia: “No one even knew where it (Indonesia) was!”, she said. Out came the atlas and subsequent remarkable months of staying with host families in some of the most remote parts of the country.
After meeting the Malaysian man who would go on to become her husband at university in Auckland, Kathryn returned to Asia with a full-time move to Malaysia in 1977. She worked as a teacher full-time until the Sumatra tsunami of 2004, when NGOs queued up for her expertise and Indonesian language skills. She ended up taking up the challenge of setting up schools again across the area after the disaster.
Since 2009, Kathryn has been setting up schools of a different kind after she was approached to help educate undocumented children. “It was the shock of my life! There were hundreds of children just running wild and forbidden from going to school.”
Kathryn set up her first school in a rural community in 2009. She had already done similar work for the Malaysian government in the past but this was a completely different challenge. A total lack of funding requires huge levels of donations from ordinary people. “It’s really incredible just how much the ordinary citizen cares for other people”, Kathryn says. The examples she provides are nothing short of remarkable. Recently, an entire team of dentists came from Thailand to provide equipment and their services for a school that Kathryn’s Matakana organisation was running.
Teachers here take on a different role entirely from a conventional school. They almost exclusively come from the areas that they now work in and are provided with training from Matakana. Whilst normally these would be high-skilled hires, Kathryn focuses on other things: “I can teach them the knowledge, I can’t do anything about their heart”, she says. As important as imparting facts to children is, the educators are also facing an uphill battle to restore children’s faith in themselves. Throughout their entire lives they have been marginalised and denied basic dignity so often, the toughest challenge is teaching them that they matter.
Matakana has now grown to a much larger scale. There are seven schools in plantations and seven in towns or cities that have some kind of access to electricity. Those on plantations are often hours by car from any other habitation. In areas such as this there is often a total lack of electricity and most have never even heard of the internet.
In late December 2023, unconnected.org began their work with Matakana and sent 16 internet connectivity devices to offer internet connection (all but three are already installed). Already, the impact has been extraordinary. Kathryn tells of the first lesson in which one teacher used the internet to download a map from the internet and began to explain the concept of the globe and other countries to students. “To see the kids’ faces was just incredible”, she says.
As a result of unconnected.org’s programme, roughly 800 pupils have already been connected to the internet in their classrooms for the first time. Once the remaining three internet connectivity devices are installed that number will reach roughly 1000.
Getting the teachers to fully embrace the new technologies has been a challenge at times but the initial reactions were often like those of their students. Kathryn recalled when one 30-year-old teacher first got our connectivity partner's high-speed internet and he was “hysterical ... laughing .. almost rolling around on the ground”. This has been a year of trialling and early implementation so far, but going into 2025 the organisation plans to offer more training to teachers from all of the schools with new access. “Once the teachers can do it, the children can do it”, Kathryn points out. “This is breaking a whole culture and I’m very excited about it.”
The internet is key in other areas too. Although undocumented people can’t work conventional jobs, in the future they could work from home if they have access to a computer and the internet. After COVID, Kathryn pivoted the syllabus for all the schools to include more practical classes like sewing, cooking, interview prep, and ICT. In the city schools with more stable access to the internet, some students have even set up small businesses with their newfound graphic design skills. Whilst some have sold knitted items to people on their way to evening prayers, others have used their sewing skills and even baked biscuits. There is a distinct appetite for entrepreneurism that Kathryn is desperate to stoke: “They know that school is their only hope”.
Technology also enables better sexual education. Although Kathryn says there is relatively little gender inequality in Sabahan Malaysian culture for young people, there have been some examples of molestation and even rape on plantations. Determined to prevent any kind of sexual abuse from happening in the future, Matakana now talks to girls and parents together to help them understand the issue and the importance of reporting any potential cases. Later this year, they will host a three-day live-in with girls over the age of nine to help them understand the importance of reporting past and future events.
Kathryn and Matakana are not alone in tackling this problem. Across Malaysia, an unlikely coalition of charities and groups has come together to take on the issue together. Although there is no formal agreement, they regularly share donations, problems, and solutions to further their joint goal of education for all.
The outcomes from Matakana’s schools are perhaps the most encouraging signs of success. Many return to Indonesia to study at university and get skilled jobs whilst some join the Indonesian Navy. Either way, they are breaking a cycle of poverty and entrapment that has lasted generations.
That hope is a theme that continues throughout the conversation with Kathryn. Since she first started setting up the schools 15 years ago she has noticed a stark change in the public attitude towards undocumented people. At first, she was shocked but now “many university students ask to come to the schools.” She posits that “they’ve developed in themselves a sense of humanity … that we’re all equal.”
Overall, Kathryn has great hope for the future. Following our conversation, more hardware has been sent out to help bring the children’s education experience forward even more. Thanks to Kathryn and those like her, the future of those stateless in Sabah is a little bit brighter.
