Transforming The Lives of Children in Cartagena

Over the past 18 months, we had to adapt to an ever-evolving set of challenges introduced by the pandemic. However, this past quarter felt like going back to normalcy, as we had more opportunities to conduct our day-to-day activities without disruption whilst keeping up with the biosecurity measures to protect the health of our kids. Below is a summary of the main highlights for this period:

Breakfast club: During the last quarter we delivered over 4400 breakfast meals, accounting for 7.400 year to date and well over 15.000 since we started the project 32 months ago. This is a very important milestone and we wanted to take this chance to thank you once again for partnering with us.

School reinforcements: We conducted 18 sessions to reinforce kids learning in areas where we see deficiencies from their school progress, these topics included: teaching the basic reading skills of recognizing the alphabet letters and math operations such as addition, subtraction, and multiplication according to the kid's age groups. Most of these activities are delivered with the help of games so that kids can learn by playing which gives them extra motivation to engage in the learning process. We also provided 10 English sessions where kids can learn conversational skills by practicing everyday life words such as colors, animals, greetings, and others. For kids aged 5 and below, we conducted 6 workshops for early stimulation where they could learn to recognize geometric shapes. Additionally, this age group also benefits from a strengthening of the relationship with their mothers in the degree to which they take part in these activities.

Women empowering: We conducted 4 workshops for the mothers of the kids to continue developing skills in decoration and other manual activities with the objective of allowing them to create their own products and start small businesses.

As we mentioned in our previous report, we have the goal of building new facilities to keep up with the growing number of kids that are benefitting from our service, over the last 2+ years we went from 30 to almost 100 kids and our ambition is to serve 200. We shall report to you as we progress on this important milestone, so stay tuned!