Main Barriers to Education
- Poverty
- Rural location
- Natural disaster
- Low availability of public education
- Expensive private education (up to 50% of income)
- Child labour
- Infrastructure
Haiti was Latin America’s first independent nation and one of the oldest Republics of Western Hemisphere. In 1804, a decade of slave uprising culminated in the independency from France. Revolts resulted in the elimination of slavery and in the foundation of the Haitian Republic. Starting with a devastated economy and infrastructure, the Republic was later entrenched in opposition from Europe, and the U.S. Southern states. The struggle for unity and racial conflicts constituted serious barriers to national stability and development.
Throughout its 200-year history, Haiti has been marked by political instability, weak institutional capacity, and natural disasters. Decades of poverty, environmental degradation, violence, instability and dictatorship have left it as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere: more than half the population is living in poverty (UNDP 2012).
Recently, a series of external shocks further increased the country’s fragility and reversed the small gains made between 2004 and 2008. The increase in food and fuel prices in 2007, storms and hurricanes in 2008 and an earthquake in 2010 caused widespread devastation and losses. The earthquake alone resulted in 250,000 people lost, 1.6 million displaced and the interruption of schooling to approximately 2.5 million children (UNICEF 2012), one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recorded history.
sources: UNDP, UNICEF
Projects
Quality Basic Education for OOSC in Haiti
EAC and Care are working in Haiti to improve quality, equity and access to primary education for 50,000 out of school children.
Remote Rural Schools Construction
The Remote Rural Schools Construction project aims to inspire, partner with, and train more than 78,000 parents in rural and isolated villages in past (buildOn) and future project locations to be active participants in improving the quality of, and access to, education for 43,056 OOSC and 117,264 children at-risk of dropping out of primary school.Partners
buildOn
For more than two decades, buildOn has partnered with local governments and mobilized rural villages in some of the poorest countries on the planet to build more than 618 schools in Haiti, Malawi, Mali, Nepal, Nicaragua, and Senegal. In February 2014, they broke ground on their first school in Burkina Faso.
