School the World, Inc. | United States

Ensuring Educational Equity in Rural Guatemala and Honduras during the Pandemic

Mitigate learning losses caused by school closures and address the inequitable impact of distance learning in marginalized, rural communities in Guatemala and Honduras

AWARD YEAR
2021
FUNDING AREA
Education
PROJECT LOCATION
Guatemala | Honduras
AMOUNT AWARDED
$70,000
PROJECT DURATION
12 months

School the World (StW) works in Honduras and Guatemala to support schools in the most marginalized rural communities to keep children in school through at least 6th grade. In each community in which it works, StW forms five-year partnerships with local government, community leaders, and parents, under which all parties commit to infrastructure improvement, five years of parent training, and two years of teacher training in literacy, classroom management, and social and emotional learning. For the 2021 school year, StW’s strategy will focus on equitable interventions that address learning loss including a five-month tutoring pilot, a summer vacation school, and a low-cost smartphone solution for hybrid learning. In addition, StW will create a teacher training program focused on “catch-up” learning and will scale up its tutoring program with learnings from the pilot. Tinker funds will be used to support the scale up and evaluation of the tutoring program. In Honduras, tutors, primarily high school students, will meet with primary school students three times per week. Tutoring sessions will take place in-person in small groups, within communities where all participants know each other. These activities will reach 3,000 students in 29 communities. In Guatemala, tutors, a mix of university students and final-year high school students, will conduct tutoring sessions by phone until small, in-person gatherings are permitted, reaching 2,000 students from 30 schools. StW staff and external experts will review tutoring materials, design guidelines, and train tutors on how to contextualize learning, motivate students, and respect the rights of the child. The results of the tutoring project will be analyzed as part of a randomized controlled trial co-designed and supervised with an outside consultant who formerly worked in the Guatemalan Ministry of Education’s Monitoring and Evaluation Department.