Getting Young Mothers Back to School:

We are striving to ensure education to all Haitians but we have developed a particular interest for children in general and young girls whose parents’ poverty has prevented them from completing their high school and young mothers who could not complete their secondary school due to early pregnancy. This later project that initially intends to cover the whole country as time goes on will be first of all implemented in Laplaine, Croix-des-Bouquets, in the Department of West.

We are currently working on this project. It aims to fostering a number of children that we will get from a number of young mothers to whom we will provide supports to complete their secondary education. It is also part of the plan to help them get a profession or a paraprofessional activity once they have completed their secondary education. In an attempt to habituate them to working for a wage we will also use their workforce to assist in fostering the children.

This project in Laplaine du cul-de-sac is basically a pilot project and will be replicated in other areas in the country. A significant part of Laplaine has been urbanized during the last two decades and many schools have been built at the times that Port-au-Prince has become an area of daily violence.

Given the challenge of this project we will use the existing schools in these areas to help us realize it, but we will work with other institutions and organizations to build schools in places where there are none. We consider the need to build school in a particular place based on the distance between a child’s home and the closest school.

It is of utmost importance to consider that besides the financial problem that prevents many pupils from completing their secondary school, there is also the distance of the school to their home, and having no access to formal schooling increases the chance to have early pregnancy and children who will turn to be farmer early in their life and to get stuck in this status without formal knowledge of how to make the land productive.

Such image represents a typical cycle of underdevelopment. We want to strive to at least break the cycle of reproduction of misery and underdevelopment and education is a favorite place for us to begin with.