Note: IHF supporter and volunteer Jenica Wozniak recently spent a week at our partner site in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala. We will be posting a few of her observations and thoughts here over the coming week or two. This first piece reflects on her experience working with students in the IHF’s secondary school scholarship program.
A teacher myself, I was eager to work with the scholarship students here in Guatemala and do whatever I could to lend a hand. I tutored a couple of students one morning, and left the library with a web of tangled observations and questions.
Most kids here go to elementary school, though not all of them graduate from 6th grade. I don’t have any data, but one estimate is that about a quarter to a third of them go on to secondary school.
I worked with two kids that morning. Rebeca arrived first and she is sobresaliente en todo (outstanding at everything). Then Francisco arrived, and he needed a bit more help. He didn’t understand everything I said, so Rebeca helped us out by translating into Tz’utujil, the local Mayan language. And he can’t express himself very well in Spanish, so I’m beginning to understand why school is hard for him.
We started with math, which he seemed to understand pretty well. Then came an art-like class, which I didn’t really comprehend. He wasn’t really drawing anything himself, but rather learning about different art terms. We talked about perspective and things like that. And then came the list of vocab words. He had no textbook to reference, just a notebook filled with definitions that included some very tricky technical vocabulary. It looked like Francisco had copied down the definitions from somewhere without bothering to get the spelling right. And he clearly didn’t understand what the definitions meant because they were too complicated. Think college-level terminology and grammar. As we struggled through the exercises, I couldn’t help but wonder how in the world it was supposed to be helpful to Francisco and productive for his education.
In light of that experience with Francisco, I came up with a few thoughts for how towns like Santiago Atitlán might go about improving their educational systems. I’m not an expert in Guatemalan education policy, of course, but here’s what my experience as a teacher leads me to suggest.
First, all of the children need to complete at least the first half of secondary school. Those three extra years beyond primary school provide an immense boost to the array of career possibilities open to a student. The value of education must be recognized and taught. And the school day needs to be extended so that children are receiving instruction for more than four hours a day.
Next, the education must be available. The Guatemalan government must put forth the money so that the children are able to go to school and have the materials necessary to do their work. This is a tough one given Guatemala’s relatively poor economy and the fact that, according to the Heritage Foundation, government tax revenues account for only 11.9% of GDP (by way of comparison, Uganda is at 12.6%, India is at 17.7%, and the US is at 28.2%). But a situation where secondary education costs at least $150 a year in towns like Santiago, where many families scrape by on about $3 a day, clearly calls for some solution.
Finally, the teachers need to learn better strategies so that they can more effectively instruct the students that come to them. They need to simplify the concepts and use vocabulary the students understand. They need to provide activities that allow students to interact with the material. They need to use formative assessment to more frequently monitor student achievement. And they need to provide more individualized assistance for the students who struggle. All these changes are, clearly, difficult to enact, because teachers themselves need training. They are, nevertheless, necessary.
I believe that the well-being of a society depends on the education of its youth, and Santiago Atitlán concerns me. Is this the best we can do? While I don’t imagine I’ll ever make much of a difference in Guatemalan education policy, I am doing what I can by sponsoring a scholarship for one student in Santiago. More on that next time I post.
- Jenica
In quite a few circles, trickle-down economics has something of a bad rep - and deservedly so. The theory that cutting taxes on the wealthy is a sure-fire way to improve life for everyone has not fared particularly well in its confrontation with economic reality. They’re not new, but these two articles, from TPM and Robert Frank, do a pretty solid job of running through the empirical evidence that trickle-down theory is about as accurate as a two-buck psychic. Recent events, however, lead me to wonder whether its critics are being too harsh on trickle-down economics. My current visit to IHF partner site in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, has driven home that there is, indeed, at least one context in which trickle-down theory has something valuable to offer, namely, an economic crisis. A story from that visit will, I think, do the best job of clarifying what I mean.
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| Candelaria at Biblioteca Puerta Abierta |
Last night, I had dinner with Heidi, the Executive Director of the IHF; Jenica, a Spanish teacher who is volunteering with IHF’s scholarship program; and Candelaria, the 19-year-old tutor and teacher who supervises the scholarship program and provides study hours for the students. We sat at the corner table of the Posada de Santiago - a table with quite a bit of history for the IHF - and talked about the state of the scholarship program, Candelaria’s various educational jobs, and life in Santiago. After a while, the conversation turned to the subject of Candelaria’s family, specifically her five younger siblings. All but the youngest are in school, and the income from Candelaria, her mom, and her dad barely pays the bills, especially since one sister lost her scholarship due to lack of funding for the sponsoring organization. The entire program had folded because donors didn’t have as much to give as in the past. While the IHF’s program continues, we had to cut its size by 64 percent between 2008 and 2009 to keep it afloat. Here, it occurred to me, was a concrete example of trickle-down economics!
The current economic crisis started at the very top, with investment bankers and other financial professionals making egregiously irresponsible bets on the mortgages of people who, in great part, had been pressured or enticed into thinking they could afford to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars that they, frankly, could not. When the bets started going bad, those i-bankers lost big. But the losses didn’t stop with them. Of course, they hit the people who’s money the professionals were managing. But then, the effects trickled-down. From i-bankers to IndyMac employees to factory workers and every tax-payer in the United States.
The trickle-down effect of the crisis did not, however, respect national borders. Money flows freely from country to country these days (not in itself a bad thing), so there is hardly a community in the world that doesn’t somehow feel the effects of a crisis originating in the rarefied atmosphere of the US financial system, whether in the form of lost jobs or, as in the case of Candelaria’s sister, lower budgets for development organizations. The end result is that when American investment bankers make bad moves, kids in Guatemala lose their scholarships, and more families get closer to the brink of having to decide between education and sufficient food. The trickle, it seems, only flows when things are falling apart.
P.S. Be on the lookout for a video profile of Candelaria and her incredible educational work soon. It’ll be posted here and on the IHF’s main site, internationalhf.org.
I just stumbled across this post at Slate. The basic idea is pretty straightforward: clean water is important, water projects are a good investment, and there are plenty of ways to get involved in bringing potable water to people in marginalized communities. The most interesting point, however, is the nod to the importance of having the community “deeply involved” in the process. Without local buy-in, you end up with broken wells and unused latrines.
This recognition got me thinking about a couple of stories from places the IHF has worked: Guatemala and India. The town of Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala - home of Just Apparel and a number of other IHF partners - gets its water directly from Lake Atitlan. Apart from being stressed by the growing human population and completely over-fished, the lake is also far from pure, especially around the lakeside towns like Santiago. The lake is not only the source of drinking water, but also the site of clothes washing and bathing and the recipient of sewage and terrifyingly dirty run-off. Consequently, Petri dishes with samples of the bacterial concentration from close to the shore (which happens to be about where the town’s water pump is situated) are truly a sight to behold.
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| Women washing clothing in Lake Atitlan, Guatemala |
Now, a few years ago, after the mudslide that destroyed much of one neighborhood of Santiago, one of the myriad aid and government organizations that came to town decided to treat the Santiago’s water supply with chlorine in order to combat the spread of disease - especially crucial given the large amount of mud and other material that entered the lake as a result of the slide.
To their shock, the people of Santiago responded aggressively against the introduction of treated water. It tasted contaminated to them, and stories even began circulating that the government was trying to poison people with the water. While the move to purify drinking water was a good one - and the end goal of pure water for Santiago is vitally important - the people who implemented the plan hadn’t succeeded in talking with community members and spreading the word about what to expect. As a result, the people rejected the project. The water in Santiago today is no cleaner than it was before the mudslide.
The water experience in Santiago is indicative of a larger issue for development organizations: how best to interact with the populations we’re trying to serve. At the IHF, we’ve decided that it’s always best to err on the side of too much deliberation and consultation. Sure, it can slow the process down. But it can also lead to highly successful interventions like the IHF cookstove project. By working with community members to identify what kind of stove would be satisfactory (that is, what kind of stove they would actually use), we managed to come up with a design that worked not only in theory, but also in practice. The same sort of principles are extremely important as the world tries to address the issue of access to safe drinking water.
So, by all means, contribute to the organizations that the folks at Slate recommend. Send letters to your representatives about the Water for the World Act. But make it known that you want results, and that means you want projects built on dialogue, local involvement, and flexibility to a variety of contexts. Water may be the same the world over, but that doesn’t mean the way we provide it has to be too.
Here is a wonderful video on a spring break trip Haverford College students took as part of a class taught by Political Science Professor Anita Isaacs. Many of the trip’s participants are now part of the IHF Haverford chapter. Four years ago, I participated in a similar trip and months later founded the IHF Haverford chapter as a response. This video does an incredible job of explaining the complexities of Guatemalan society, its history, and how this class trip inspires young people to live in solidarity and work for change. Some images in the video might be disturbing.
Check it out: http://www.haverford.edu/multimedia/video/2008June/digging/
In the first post in this series, I took a look at some of the successes the IHF model has achieved in its first five years. I’d like to turn now to an important question for any organization - new or old, large or small - namely, “what can we do better?”
When looking back at our first five years, two major areas of improvement jump out.
Working with an all volunteer staff presents some apparent challenges, most immediately for the IHF’s capacity. Our volunteers work incredibly hard, and the work they do is invariably of high quality. But there are limits to what a group of volunteers can accomplish – at least if they want to sleep at night! At various points over the past five years we have had to pass on opportunities to benefit our partners due to a lack of capacity. At certain points, some of our volunteers have had to make unfair sacrifices to meet our obligations to our partners. Over the past year, we have increasingly felt the pinch of how many hours our volunteers can work as we have grown. We have been lucky to increase the number of volunteers. And we have been very lucky to benefit from the leadership of our Executive Director Heidi Jutsum, who is able to dedicate an amazing amount of time to making sure all the IHF’s volunteers are working in the right direction. This oversight is particularly important to our student volunteers – both to their growth, and to ensuring that they make meaningful contributions to our partners. But the IHF is at a point where full time staff are needed to effectively manage our volunteers and fulfill our obligations to partners.
This leads to the next significant challenge facing the organization - unrestricted fundraising to support our capacity growth. We have traditionally spent less than 2% of revenue on administration and overhead. We have not focused on raising funds to cover administration or overhead in the past. As stated above, focusing donations on the needs of our partners is one of the IHF’s central tenets. We have thought very deeply about whether we want to commit ourselves to funding a staff position.
But a full time staff position would roughly double the hours spent on IHF management and administration. More importantly, it would give this person the freedom to focus entirely on meeting our partner’s goals and fostering our volunteers’ growth. It would both expand our capacity and improve the quality of our work. With a relatively small investment, the IHF could take on new partners, work with more students and better support all our stakeholders achieving their goals.
We exist for our partners. We believe an investment in a full time staff person is consistent with our mission and model. It will present challenges, but also opportunities – and it is essential to the ongoing success of the IHF and the work we do with our partners and volunteers.
I’ll be following up next week with the last post in this series. Keep an eye out…
The IHF was founded more than five years ago to make a difference – but to do it differently. We saw ourselves as different in three ways:
- Focused on communities’ goals: we feel that putting communities in the lead on setting goals and executing projects would increase the sustainability of the IHF’s projects.
- Minimizing administration: we send donations directly to our partners abroad, and with volunteers contributing the vast majority of our labor, our administrative fees are lower than two cents per dollar – which means more resources for those who can best use them.
- Creating new leaders: by giving college students and young professionals experience with grassroots approaches to development, and giving them leadership opportunities within the IHF.
All of this sounded good on paper when the IHF got started. And it still sounds pretty good today. But how has this approach worked out on the ground?
What have we done well?
Reaching its fifth birthday is significant for any organization, but particularly for one that takes an innovative approach. The IHF’s continuous growth has been driven by three factors. First, all that we have accomplished is driven by the incredible hard work of our volunteers in the US and abroad. Second, our ability to learn and execute well has supported our ability to carry out an increasing number of increasingly complex projects. And throughout this, adherence to our model – what makes us different – has led to success on the ground.
Some numbers begin to tell this story – 300 families who don’t have to worry about indoor air pollution in India, two dozen Guatemalan kids who can attend school, a clinic in Costa Rica and dozens of graduates with exposure to grassroots development work. Working with the IHF has been genuinely life changing for many student volunteers who have gone on to focus on public health and economic development. We continue to influence students to take on the challenges of development in partnership with local communities through our work at Dartmouth and Haverford, and now at Brown.
So, there is much that we have done well. But where can we improve? More on that at the end of the week…
I’d like to start by welcoming you to the new IHF blog. Please check back often as we discuss some of the most pressing global issues we face and, more importantly, some successes the IHF (and some other groups) have had in addressing them.
Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to evaluate a number of technologies aimed at solving the problems of the developing world. These range from our very own smokeless stove program to complex water purification, to laptops for children, to pharmaceutical safety, to micro-enterprise initiatives. All of this talk of technology got me thinking.
We’ve found that technical solutions abound (if you look hard enough). This may sound odd as most global homes don’t have electricity or even access to clean water not to mention the internet or a phone line. But the engineering solutions to these measures of ‘development’ exist. Many organizations have solutions for solar power, for village-level grids, for water purification, and information distribution. So why are we still faced with the immense burden of disease posed by indoor air pollution and dirty water?
In my opinion, the deployment of technologies is where the innovation is needed. We’ve already spent countless dollars and hours developing solutions – well, partial solutions. But what good is a life-changing stove if it isn’t installed in a village home? Collaborative development, community-based implementation, and grass-roots ownership are key not only to the design of novel solutions, but also to the use, adoption, acceptance, and maintenance of long-term changes. Its time to move technologies out of the labs. I think we need far less effort spent on innovating and far more spent on innovative deployment. What do you think?
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