The benefits of instrumental music education are so well documented that such instruction is standard in schools around the world.
However, schools in some countries are often unable to provide musical education at a satisfactory level due to a lack of equipment or trained teachers or inadequate curriculum.
Through the School Project, Yamaha is working in close coordination with local government agencies and educational institutions to communicate the joy of musical instrument performance through public education. As of March 31, 2022, we have provided opportunities to learn musical instruments to an aggregate total of 1.29million children in seven countries—Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Brazil, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Egypt—while also supporting the development of environments for enjoying musical instrument performances in these countries.
In Vietnam, we have been working with the Ministry of Education and Training to offer support for recorder seminars for school teachers and for teaching material revisions through two projects, one of which has been adopted as a 2016 EDU-Port Certified Project while the other was adopted as a 2018 EDU-Port Supported Project by EDU-Port Japan, a public-private, nationwide initiative that aims to introduce Japanese-style education overseas by providing a platform from in which the public and private sectors collaborate in achieving this objective. Through these efforts, we succeeded in having instrumental music education introduced into the course curriculum guidelines for this country in 2021.
We have also been promoting the popularization of recorders in Brazil for a number of years. In this country, we have arranged online recorder seminars to continue these activities amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Meanwhile, in India, where recorders are already well established, we have launched new instrumental music activities using keyboards. In efforts such as these, we are flexibly tailoring our School Project activities to the characteristics of each region. In 2023, the School Project is scheduled to be expanded to Mexico, its second Latin American country.
In the years to come, Yamaha will continue its efforts to teach as many children as possible about the fun and joy of musical instruments as we work toward the target of providing such educational opportunities to an aggregate total of 2.3 million children by fiscal 2025 described in the medium-term management plan.