Educate Children, Inc.

Educate Children is a youth-led, non-profit organization geared towards improving enrollment and the quality of primary education in remote and slum communities across Liberia. Our vision is to see every school-aged child in school and learning well. We aim to revamp and add value to Liberia's backward education system by addressing the root cause of the problem. Primary education is a solid foundation for further educational achievement and one of the strongest predictors of success in life. As a war-torn and fourth poorest country on the globe, Liberia has only 44% of its primary age students attending primary grades. This ratio is even disproportionately lower in slum communities home... read more Educate Children is a youth-led, non-profit organization geared towards improving enrollment and the quality of primary education in remote and slum communities across Liberia. Our vision is to see every school-aged child in school and learning well. We aim to revamp and add value to Liberia's backward education system by addressing the root cause of the problem. Primary education is a solid foundation for further educational achievement and one of the strongest predictors of success in life. As a war-torn and fourth poorest country on the globe, Liberia has only 44% of its primary age students attending primary grades. This ratio is even disproportionately lower in slum communities home to children of ex-combatants, the economically disadvantaged, and the sexually assaulted men and women of Liberia. Educate Children is rooted in the belief that improving access and quality of primary education can go a long way in revamping and consolidating Liberia's devastated education system. To improve this broken system we have developed two programs to meet our goals. Program (1): Enrollment Through Local Philanthropy Enrollment Through Local Philanthropy (ETLP) will be our primary program which aims to increase primary school enrollment through local philanthropy within Liberia. This program will target the enrollment of primary-age children in slum communities who have either never been enrolled in school or have dropped out due to economic factors. Through a system of Volunteers Operation in specific local communities, Educate Children will embark on campaigns to identify primary-age children in slum communities who are not enrolled in school. Using a well-designed and standard survey questionnaire, volunteers will conduct a Need Assessment Study with families of the un-enrolled children to identify primary-age children who truly lack access to, or have dropped out of, primary education due to economic constraints. Volunteers will then create a short story of the pressing need of each un-enrolled child and compile all the stories as a Community Need Document (CND). With the CND, Educate Children will identify sponsors whose support will allow these slum community children to enroll in school. Sponsors will be local donors, philanthropists, humanitarians, well-meaning individuals as well as corporate funding partners- companies who, by law, give corporate social responsibility to various social ventures in Liberia. By agreeing to become a sponsor in our Enrollment Through Local Philanthropy program, Educate Children will automatically pair a child or children with a sponsor depending on the number of students they can support. Although sponsors grant funds to Educate Children to enroll the child or children in school, our Pairing System will ensure sponsors, if they so choose, can have a more concrete idea and be able to track the progress of the children they are supporting in school. Moreover, every sponsor will also have access to CND before they sign the Sponsorship Agreement. To allow for more flexibility, a sponsor or funding partner can choose to delegate their donations to support a specific child based on his or her story or simply donate to Educate Children to enroll in any of the children in school. Program (2) Remedial Education Remedial Education Program (REP) will aim at improving learning outcomes and the quality of primary education in Liberia's most dilapidated slum communities. It will be Educate Children's flagship program geared towards enhancing the overall quality of primary education and building a strong educational foundation for children in slum communities. REP will focus on helping students with poor Math and English skills develop strong numeracy and literacy and average students to further improve their numeracy and literacy. REP is distinct from the first program, ETLP, in that it will be implemented in slum-community-schools with really poor quality of learning regardless of whether or not we have students enrolled in these schools through our ETLP program. With a remedial curriculum designed by professional experts in the field of education administration, REP will be an academic-year-long program and will mirror and improve on existing Math and English curricula in the schools. The curriculum will be tailored to the context of Liberian children while delivering improved learning outcomes in Liberian schools comparable to advanced international standards. Like ETLP, REP will be implemented in schools by local community volunteers. Volunteers will be recruited based on a certain education standard. Volunteers will be trained as instructors by Educate Children and its education administration partners. Trained volunteers will teach the remedial curriculum in target schools, ensuring maximum learning outcomes. Through our partnership with government or public and private school administrators, volunteer instructors will be allowed 2 teaching hours (called period in Liberia) - one for English/literacy and the other for Math/numeracy- 2 times a week to instruct our curriculum. Unlike traditional classroom structures in Liberia where teachers simply present and leave, our REP will be implemented in an interactive way. During our volunteer instructors' teaching hours, classrooms will be intentionally structured/arranged in an interactive way that allows children to collaborate while learning. In an effort to solve the gap in learning outcomes in traditional classrooms in Liberia where one or two bright students understand it all while all others nod in ignorance, our interactive learning model/system will make learning more fun for children. It will allow for struggling students to catch up with peers and bright students to further improve while the instructors check and monitor progress with them all.