IN BANGLADESH, it is not uncommon for children to trek to school without shoes, even in winter, carrying nothing but a piece of paper and a pencil in their hands.

But they still have smiles on their faces. And it's all thanks to a Warwick man - retired military man Fred Hyde.

Mr Hyde has helped build more than 40 primary schools on the island of Bhola, in Bangladesh, under his charity, Co-Operation in Development (COID).

Currently 12,574 children are being educated through the schools Mr Hyde helped build.

Olav Muurlink is the charity's management committee chairman and recently spent about a month in Bangladesh.

He said learning how to read and write was a "life and death" situation.

He said people had died on the island because they could not read and tell the difference between poison and medicine.

"The ability to read and write - we've kind of forgotten how important it is in Australia," Mr Muurlink said.

Mr Hyde's work has touched thousands.

Rosel Miah, a former student who now works as a headmaster at one of the schools, says many students came from very poor families.

"We have a lot of children here who are orphans," he said.

"They are so poor that some of them don't have clothes, and they are forced to sleep in dilapidated huts on their own, or sometimes with relatives."

At his school, teachers have initiated a program where they use school grounds to grow vegetables as a fundraiser for the poorest students.

Mr Hyde, now in his 90s, said he was inspired to start up schools after hearing about how a father had died because he consumed insect spray, having mistaken it for medicine because he couldn't read.

"Without us, there would be 12,000 children there at the moment not receiving an education," he said.

It's not just children's lives that Mr Hyde has changed. Teachers at the schools also rely on the wages, which go towards feeding their extended families.

Mr Muurlink said paying 180 staff kept about 1000 people alive.

Mr Hyde's work in Bangladesh started in 1970 when a tropical cyclone combined with high tides flooded the region and killed about half a million people in the Bay of Bengal.

He started helping homeless orphans survive, and this led him to building a network of schools.

Mr Hyde has seen the island of Bhola flourish over the years - houses that were once made of straw are now made of brick. There used to be no roads, but now there is bitumen.

"When I first went there, the bulk of people couldn't read or write, and hadn't for generations," Mr Hyde said.

But now the school is educating a second generation - past students who went to the school are now grown up and have children of their own attending the school.

For the pst 35 years, Mr Hyde has regularly travelled back and forth between Australia and Bangladesh.

But now he has retired and has handed over the reins of his charity. He said a lot of funds raised were from schools across Australia.