Search results for: education

By Cathleen O’Grady

In impoverished communities, children face many barriers to receiving a quality education. A lack of funds for school uniforms or basic school supplies can prevent children from attending school, and poor health or lack of sufficient food can keep children sick at home, or leave them focusing on rumbling bellies rather than schoolwork. Children whose parents have never had access to education may not be able to help with homework, and children who contribute to household income may struggle to balance school with the responsibilities of work.

Many excellent charities focus on removing one barrier at a time, providing school supplies, tutoring programs, or school feeding schemes. Safe Passage, Foundation Beyond Belief’s Q1 2014 Education beneficiary, is remarkable in its broad focus, recognizing that only when all of these barriers are removed will education be genuinely accessible. Its programs address educational access at all levels for children living in and around Guatemala City’s garbage dump. Financial support for school supplies, adult literacy programs, sponsorship for promising students, and lessons at unconventional school times to assist working children all contribute to making education accessible to everyone in the community.

In addition to helping children and their parents with classes and financial sponsorship, Safe Passage’s Educational Reinforcement Center provides holistic care to address other difficulties that may cause a child to struggle at school. Medical care, a hot meal, extra-curricular programming, a safe place to play and socialize, a place to do homework, and after-school tutoring are available to all students who live in the community around the garbage dump, helping to combat all the outside stressors that may inhibit a child’s educational attainment.

Silvia, 17 years old, is studying tourism and hotel management at a school in another region of Guatemala City. She comes to Safe Passage every day to use the computers and do her homework, before heading home to the two-room stone house she shares with her parents and nine siblings. “Without Safe Passage I would never have had the possibility to go to a school like this. I would work in the dump and have children already,” she says. “Now I’m more educated and don’t have to have children at an early age, because without education there is no money and more poverty. I’m very lucky. Safe Passage pays all my school fees, the uniform, the school material. Furthermore, my family gets a monthly food bag.”

Luis was one of the first students at Safe Passage in 1999, graduating from high school ten years later. After his father was killed by a bulldozer at the garbage dump, Luis, his mother, and his four siblings eked out a living scavenging for scrap materials at the dump, until Luis joined Safe Passage. While studying, he was able to earn a living by working in the kitchen at Safe Passage. “Without [Safe Passage], I wouldn’t be here where I am today,” says Luis. “Before, I couldn’t read and write. [Now], I love writing and will have my own book someday.”

Pathfinders Project will be working with Safe Passage in May and June of this year. For more information about Safe Passage, take a look at their website, or keep up with them on Facebook or YouTube.

By Cathleen O’Grady

As vital as it is to provide promising young students in developing countries with educational opportunities, it can sometimes have an unwelcome and unintended effect: brain drain. Young, bright students with good qualifications may see foreign countries as holding better opportunities for themselves and their families, and – understandably – put their education to use building a life for themselves elsewhere.

Brain drain is a serious problem in Latin America, and has many negative consequences. It limits the number of skilled professionals available in the home country, who could be invaluable in helping to build the economy, provide training, and develop a solid skills base. However, it can also be detrimental to migrant workers, who often end up in jobs not commensurate with their education levels. Combatting brain drain is largely a matter of creating attractive opportunities for skilled workers, which may encourage them to remain in their home country.

Roots and Wings International, FBB’s Q4 Education beneficiary, recognizes the problem of brain drain and is committed to finding ways to encourage its scholarship recipients to remain in Guatemala. By employing only Guatemalan people on the board of the organization’s Guatemalan counterpart, RWI is creating jobs and providing job experience and training, while simultaneously ensuring that its policies and practices are in line with what is most needed in the country.

Recipients of educational funding from RWI are encouraged in many ways to reinvest their skills to build a stronger and more stable Guatemalan economy. Scholarship winners study at universities near their home villages so that they can remain vested in their home communities, and all winners make a commitment to use their education to promote community development. Students are also encouraged to maintain some type of employment throughout their studies, contributing to the local economy while gaining the skills to help it grow even further.

RWI recognizes that the essential work of promoting education in a developing country also requires careful thought about how to ensure that this work benefits the country in the long term, and is committed to emphasizing the importance of community investment. It is constantly working toward new programs that will combat brain drain in Guatemala, and that will help investment in education to sow local benefits.

For more information about Roots and Wings International, take a look at their website, or keep up with them on Facebook, YouTube, or their blog.

By Sarah Henry

Around the world, about 117 million school-age children aren’t attending school, and about 53% of those absentee students are girls. Women’s Global Education Project (WGEP), our current Education beneficiary, is working to change that, with a focus in Senegal and Kenya.

WGEP originated in Senegal in 2003. Its founder, Amy Moglia, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal, where she helped her village sister enroll in school for the first time.

After its launch in Senegal, WGEP expanded its programs to Kenya, with a focus on female education and the prevention of female genital mutilation. WGEP works with local community partners to ensure that their goals are being met. In Kenya, WGEP partners with Ntanira Na Mugambo Tharaka Women’s Welfare Project (TWWP), an organization that pledges to improve living conditions for women and girls in the Tharaka/Meru region of Kenya. The biggest drive that WGEP has put into play in Kenya has been the Alternative Right of Passage program. This program works to educate girls and their role models about school and women’s rights, and celebrates girls’ passage into adulthood with the cutting of cake, rather than the cutting of genitals.

In Senegal, WGEP is working closely with Union Democratique Des Ensiegnantes de Senegal (UDEN), a 20-year-old national organization of Senegalese primary and secondary school teachers dedicated to supporting education and the teaching profession throughout Senegal. One main focus of WGEP and UDEN’s partnership is the development of the Sisters to School program. Sisters to School works to provide need-based elementary school scholarships to young girls, and achievement- and need-based scholarships for secondary schooling. WGEP also has lots of community goings-on in Senegal and is always working to provide the next level of education and care to girls and women in more rural and poorer regions of Senegal. Right now, WGEP is also working to provide health and safety seminars and first aid kits to families and groups, and to organize more advanced training for teachers in Senegalian schools, because, as any student can tell you, having an excellent teacher serves as an extra motivator. WGEP also works to provide education to women who are no longer school age, organizing trade workshops to teach women for-profit work, and teaching adult literacy classes, so that women are more able to support and understand their daughters’ new schooling.

Women’s Global Education Project is working in Senegal and Kenya to guarantee that women and girls are receiving the best education possible, and Foundation Beyond Belief is happy to support them in their efforts. You can follow WGEP’s efforts on their website, their Facebook page, and their YouTube channel.

Pathfinders Project is a yearlong international service trip sponsored by Foundation Beyond Belief. As they carry out their service work, the Pathfinders send us occasional reports about the projects, the places, and the people they meet along the way. Wendy Webber shared this story about the challenges that face students who live in the floating village of Kampong Klein.

Kampong Klein—about 40 miles from Siem Reap—is a floating village.  The homes are on stilts so that they are not flooded when the wet season comes and the river swells.  During the wet season most homes are only accessible by boat.  Even though we entered the school we visited from dry land we could see the water lapping against the shore through the slats between the floorboards as we ate lunch cross-legged on the floor.  Women collect water from the main floor of their home by dropping a bucket connected to a rope.  Children swim in the water around their home like some children play on the grass of their front yards.  To get gas we pulled our boat up to a house boat—a true house boat—and handed the woman inside an empty soda bottle that she filled with gas, which we poured into our engine.  Almost everyone has one job—fishing.  Closer to Siem Reap the residents of floating villages can also farm in the dry season, but not in Kampong Klein.  Fish and shrimp make up most people’s livelihood.  Some people also raise pigs in floating pens that rise and fall with every wave, but that is rare.

Some houses in Kampong Klein and the other nearby floating villages are rather nice homes.  Just because a family lives in a floating village does not mean they are living in abject poverty.  But there are things we who live on dry land take for granted.  Kids from Kampong Klein have a thirty minute boat ride to get to school.  That’s just to the edge of the water.  Then they have to walk to school.  And that’s only if they have a motor on their boat—most kids row themselves.  These are not kids who take their education for granted.

These are also kids whose family can afford to send their kids to school.  These are the kids who live in brightly painted homes with tin roofs and satellite dishes.  Many kids in the floating villages do not have access to a boat to go to school—so they don’t go to school.  But it’s not just access to a boat that hampers poor children’s education.  The Cambodian school system is a bribery system.  Students often have to bribe the teacher each morning in order to be taught at all.  They have to bribe the teacher to have a test graded.  Teachers sometimes sell the answer key to their own final exams to their students.  Students who don’t bribe their teachers will simply get bad grades as a result.  I can’t entirely fault the teachers for engaging in this practice though.  Most teachers make only $50 (USD) a month, which is simply not a living wage.  This is a systemic problem.  Teachers have to bribe their principals and principals have to bribe the local Education Ministry office.  Students learn how to bribe as they learn how to read.

Kampong Klein, however, offers a free school for the poor kids of the village, which is only possible because of Bridge of Life School.  This school is why we were in Kampong Klein this weekend.  The school is a Khmer language school so we were not there to teach.  We were there to observe and we gave the kids toothbrushes and a lesson—through a translator—on oral hygiene.  We listened to the kids learning to count and they sang an alphabet song.  The song we heard was only the consonants—Khmer has 33 consonants—and it was much longer then our English alphabet song.  When the lesson was over the teacher released the students row by row.  When dismissed each student bowed and thanked the teacher.  After all the students were dismissed many approached the teacher to thank him personally.  These are not kids who take their education for granted.