There are tens of thousands of children in Sabah who are excluded from the Malaysian education system.

They are the children of migrant workers from Indonesia and the Philippines.

Government schools are closed to them because they do not have the correct identity documents and are not locals.

However another educational door has opened up.

As Vanitha Nadaraj revels, international schools have cropped up in the interior of Sabah just to cater for these children.

In a shop above a car workshop more 200 Indonesians and Filipino children are learning maths.

This small room in the East coast town of Lahad Datu has been turned into the Humana Learning Centre.

Every inch is filled with migrant children in yellow and green uniforms.

Eight-year old Armandin, who has Indonesian parents, is one of them.

The teachers are very good here. My favourite subject is Malay. I live near by this school so it’s easy.

Armandin’s parents work in Lahad Datu, a town of 160 thousands people. Many of her school mates live in nearby oil palm plantations where their parents work.

These children do not have the correct travel and identification documents. This normally stops them from getting an education but not here. This school takes students from five to 12 years old and charges RM 250 or 60 US dollars a year.

A 30-year-old mother from Sulawesi hopes that with even such basic education her seven-year-old daughter can have a better future.

If there were no Humana schools, what will happen. - I have to send her back to Indonesia, if there were no humana schools here. We want our children to be like other children, getting educated and succeeding.

This school is run by the Humana Child Aid Society of Sabah. They began in 1991 with the aim of giving a basic education to undocumented migrant children up to the age of 12. Now they run 55 schools with 34,000 students through out Sabah.

It’s the brain child of Torben Venning, a Dane married who married a local woman.

We have a few sunshine stories and that of a child who came back to a school in Indonesia. She became the president of her school, she also became the assistant English teacher, because she picked up a lot of English during her stay in our school. So we have good record for those who continue their schooling. We also that some of them, some of our former pupils are working as staff in offices, and oil mills, plantations, and that we’ve only had good reports about them. Then I can say for ourselves, three of our present teachers, they started with us as students in our school, and I think we’re going to have more of them.

Indeed, after an agreement between Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, 51 Indonesian teachers have been posted to the Humana schools. Another 100 or so will arrive next year.

Iskandar Abdullah the Indonesian Consul based in Kota Kinabalu says the children will also be taught about their motherland Indonesia.

He says the decision to do this came after talking to children at one of the plantations in the East Coast of Sabah.

When we visited one of the plantations, we asked them who their president was. No one knew. This was so disheartening because they are citizens of Indonesia. They get the basics - reading, writing and arithmetic - they will also get basic studies on Indonesia.

About 10 kilometres further into the interior in Kampung Silam is another school.
It’s run by a Filipina Muslim from Jolo, Usand Polo.

The school caters for fisherman children, who are mainly undocumented southern Filipinos.

Unsang , who is 49, has been in Malaysia for almost 20 years. Here in this little wooden hut she provides basic education to around 40 Filipino children, who pay RM 10 a month or 2 US dollars.

If I did not teach these children, maybe if they grow bigger, some of them like for example those 16 years and above, maybe they’ll have a drug abuse. If they have no mind, if their mind is closed, cannot explain very well or do not know how to do well. Because an illiterate person don’t know what is good and what is bad.

Migrants are often accused by local Sabahans and mainland Malaysia’s of being behind the high crime rate on the Island.

Torben Venning, says keeping that in mind, these schools are important for Sabah.

“I think that everybody will agree that children without education there’s definitely a big chance that they might become a big problem to society later on. And definitely their chances of contributing to society is very, very small. I think this is basically talking about a win, win, win, win situation - where parents, children, local society and everybody actually gaining from this.”