Help more young people to finish their studies

We have reached the halfway point of the year, and with it we face more opportunities, but also more challenges.

First, we started in August with other groups of young students as part of the High Opportunity High Schools program.

Second, we are in negotiations to expand our project to other provinces of the country, with low school retention rates and in vulnerable areas, close to the capital San José. We expect to reach more than 100 students, approximately next year. 

Finally, we hope to develop more news as we finalize the semi-annual report in the coming weeks.

We appreciate all the help and support we have from our partners and also from you, thank you!

This year we return with new initiatives in favor of education for young people.

Education is a key tool for social mobility, allowing more people to grow both personally and professionally.

This year we return with our project to work with a network of public high schools to improve educational management processes for permanence, impacting both teachers and young people who can become leaders in their high schools.

Additionally, we started with a project focused on educational governance, which allows us to work at the regional and central level with the Ministry of Public Education of Costa Rica. Our objective is to develop a work model that allows decisions to be made based on data, affecting permanence and its factors.

With these goals in mind, we seek the support of key allies that allow us to expand our reach and continue working for youth.

The end of the year is approaching and we would like to tell you about our main results in numbers:

• Activities with young people to promote educational permanence: 87%.
• Activities with employees to promote educational permanence: 62
• Number of young participants: 407
• Number of staff members participating: 74

So far this year we have been able to work on the issue of permanence and employability by joining efforts between companies and educational centers, for which we have also started with vocational tours.

Permanency is a national need and an opportunity for social mobility for thousands of young people who have been affected in the present and future at the socio-economic level as a result of the pandemic.

Thanks to your support these efforts are possible, let's continue adding so that more people can benefit.

The COVID-19 crisis has generated a social and economic impact in all of the country’s areas. However, it is very likely that the adolescent and young population will experience the results and consequences of the crisis the hardest, as they are particularly exposed to the socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic. In this sense, educational exclusion represents a huge challenge for adolescents and young people in our country. According to data from the latest Continuous Employment Survey, in Costa Rica, 60.4% of young people over 15 years of age do not finish high school.

The problem of educational exclusion has a significant impact at a national level, since it involves resources invested by the State, as well as efforts by the Ministry of Public Education (MEP) and the Costa Rican society, in the medium and long term, impacting on the social fabric and in the economic and productive structure of the country. The foregoing implies a periodic decrease in the young Costa Rican population that enters the labor market, and that will have to support a growing number of older adults.

It is for this reason that this project poses a transcendental importance, seeking to impact student permanence from 13 schools, we continue working in this line through participatory methodologies and developing tools to ensure that more young people finish their studies.

At Fundación Acción Joven we continue with the full commitment to support young people to complete their studies, in times of crisis worldwide, the young population is the one that will be most affected in the medium term, being the generation that assumes the future consequences of the context. Given this situation, providing tools that allow them to continue developing personally and professionally is essential. Education is a fundamental mechanism to ensure development and progress. We want to encourage you to continue supporting our efforts and be part of the change, to have a more and better opportunities fof the young people.