Urubamba Children's Education Project.
Change the lives of children in rural Peru!
By helping us improve kid's education in Urubamba you will have a huge impact on their ability to escape poverty.
Urubamba is a rural district in the southern Andes of Peru, 78 km northeast of Cuzco. It is home to some of Peru's poorest people. 78% of the indigenous community live below the US$2 a day poverty line. Almost one half of the children do not complete primary school and the quality of education they receive is often poor.
Nexos Voluntarios, a Lima Peru-based charity, has been working in Urubamba since early 2008 (see http://www.nexosvoluntarios.org). They are run by an incredible woman named Carolina Benavides Piaggio who is extremely well known and connected in the Peruvian social change movement. Carolina writes regularly in El Commercio, Peru's national newspaper. Nexos has supported a United Nations health promotion project and a reforestation initiative in Urubamba. Now they would like to improve the education services offered to children in the area. Nexos Voluntarios will use their local contacts and goodwill to ensure that families and teachers are engaged and feel ownership of the project. They have suggested the following protocol and I have had it validated by education experts in here in North America:
1. A NEEDS ASSESSMENT of the six selected schools in the area. We need to ascertain why the system is failing and how best to allocate our time and resources. We suspect the solution lies in not building schools and supplying materials but in motivating and training teachers. The assessment will consist of interviewing teachers, students and parents. The assessment will be carried out, starting in July of this year by Aroma de la Cadena Fernandez a Lima based Education Expert who has spent the past seven years formulating and monitoring education strategies in rural communities.
2. TRAINING teachers and reflecting with them on daily life challenges related to burn-out and quality of education. We will be paying for Ms. Elizabeth Gruenfeld, a Harvard educated International Education Consultant to develop and run workshops in the community. Elizabeth has extensive experience training teachers in post conflict environments. She is very familiar with communities such as Urubamba. She will prepare the workshops after reviewing the NEEDS ASSESSMENT and be in Urubamba in late August/early September.
3. Preparing a PROGRAM with the help of the Ministry of Education to implement the recommendations of Ms. Gruenfeld in the various schools.
4. FOLLOW-UP reports every 3 months. Nexos Voluntarios will visit each school to verify the efficacy of the program.
5. TRAINING parents to look after their children's education. It is important to have parents actively participate in their children's education and stimulate pleasant and fun studying at home. Nexos Voluntarios will hold "reflection sessions" with parents to learn more about their struggles, challenges, and expectations for thier children's education and the services provided by the schools
I am raising money here in Canada to support the first two phases of this project (Cdn $9000) which will be run this year. I will visit Urubamba (at my own expense) in August to gauge the success of our project and plan on providing reports to all donors. Charitable receipts will be issued by GiveMeaning and the project will be validated by Tides Foundation (http://www.tidescanada.org)
Please join me in helping to educate the children of this rural community!