Factors Related to Poverty It is no coincidence that the Orang Asli should experience both a disproportionately high rate of poverty and a disproportionately high rate of school dropouts. The two are intimately related. As any parent of schoolgoing children will know, it is not a cheap affair to send and keep a child in school, even if only the most basic of schooling needs are to be met. It has been estimated that, without any subsidy or other financial support, a parent would need RM100.00 to RM150.00 per schoolgoing child. With most families having several schoolgoing children at a time, sometimes as many as 4 or 5, Orang Asli parents would have to have a sizeable amount of funds at the start of the school year. And this is where problem becomes more serious: the start of the school year follows the month of November/December which, because they are the wettest months of the year, are also the months when it is most difficult to get cash incomes. Rubber yield is usually low while collection and sale of forest produce, such as rattan, is both dangerous and not in demand. Thus, January is a time when already poor Orang Asli are expected to cough out a considerable amount of money for school expenses at a time when there is very little sources of cash income. In the absence of any form of government subsidy or financial support, Orang Asli parents would also have to fork out recurring expenses such as school fees, transportation, meal allowance and extra-curricular activity expenses. As such, there can be no understating how important the government subsidies mentioned in Table 4 are for the Orang Asli. To illustrate the point, I can cite the case of the Semai community in Woh, Tapah where prior to 1993 no Orang Asli went to school from that area. However, a parent then was very keen for his child to attend school and asked the JHEOA to help with transport. The JHEOA agreed on the condition that there were more students in order to justify the cost of hiring a school 52 ORANG ASLI – RIGHTS, PROBLEMS & SOLUTIONS