"I spent all of my savings to send my 4 children to school this year. Education is an investment for the future, it is something my children will always have and no one can take away. I was not educated, but my children can be. I am so proud of this.”
The crisp uniforms of children walking hand in hand with their parents to school, up steep mountains and through dense traffic and noxious puddles, is a visual that will always remain with me. Here, education matters. No one takes it for granted. You notice it right away.
Weeks, maybe months later, you will begin to see that most of the kids going to school are 3,5, 7 years old. There are less teenagers, and very few children who are practically adults. Only 29% of students graduate from primary school (Grade 6). Why?
Most Haitians cannot afford to send their children to school every year. The Red Cross reports that in many cases, school fees can exceed $140 per trimester per child. Our household pays 500 gourdes ($12) per month for the 3 year old daughter of one of our house-staff to go to preschool. 43% of families of children not attending school report that the major reason is cost. The interrupted nature of schooling in Haiti results in an average age of a Grade 5 student being 15.3 years old, versus the theoretical age of 11 years old. Overage students are not the result of grade repetition or dropping out of school, but rather late entrance into the school system.
Those who do send their children to school sacrifice many other things in order to do so. The data that we collect on incoming Solidarity clients at Fonkoze strongly illustrates this priority of the Haitian people. These statistics are prior to receiving any money or services from Fonkoze.
0% have running water from a pipe or a faucet.
52% do not know how to read and write.
79% are food insecure, which means they eat less than 2 meals each day and often do not know where their next meal is coming from.
Yet, with all this hardship:
78% send all of their children to school.
A special report by BRAC on Fonkoze's CLM pilot, our program for the ultra-poor, reported that "the obstacle to education... was not attitudinal, but economic. As soon as members’ economic capacity increased, they invested this into educating their children." The direct cost of schooling (registration, tuition and exam fees, uniform, textbooks and other supplies) was calculated (in 1980) to represent, on an average, 11 to 13% of per capita income. Half of all Haitian households live in absolute poverty, that is, on less than $1/day.
What I find very powerful to read is how much Haitians identify education with investment and insurance:
1: “I used my savings to pay for my children’s school fees. I know my case-manager advised me to use it to start a small trade, but a business is here one day and can be depleted tomorrow. There is nothing more valuable than a child’s education, which is an investment for the future. My case-manager agreed.”
2: “I sold a goat to pay for school fees this September. No one advised me of this, Haitians pride education. If I can teach my children to hold a pen, they will help me one day.”
3: “It costs a lot to educate a child in Haiti; you have to work very hard. When I helped them with their education, I considered it like putting money into a savings account. My children are my bank account.”
Most client quotations come from the following source: CLM Final Evaluation
Too bad so many Americans take education for granted and don't understand how good they have it to get a free education! When we wrote our dossier to adopt in Haiti they told us the same thing. Make sure you emphasize education because Haitians value education so much. Thank you for the work you are doing there!
ReplyDeleteEducation in the US is NOT free (paid for with tax dollars). It IS under appreciated, though.
ReplyDelete