Mission: Child Aid’s mission is to create opportunity for Latin America’s rural and indigenous poor through childhood literacy programs.
Results: In 2015, Child Aid:
- Trained 76 librarians representing 48 rural libraries.
- Supplied 76 libraries with over 100,000 quality children’s books.
- Partnered with 52 schools in rural indigenous communities.
- Trained 477 teachers to promote and teach reading more effectively.
- Engaged over 14,000 children in school-based literacy activities.
- Conducted over 16,000 one-on-one classroom training sessions with teachers.
- Brought 173,000 Spanish-language children's books to Guatemala.
- Improved book collections in 128 schools and libraries.
- Designated over 89% of our funds directly to program use.
Target demographics: poor, indigenous children in Guatemala
Direct beneficiaries per year: 52 schools with 477 participating teachers who teach over 11,000 children.
Geographic areas served: Guatemala
Programs: Though our teacher training and librarian training programs we help more than 28,500 children improve their lives through education. Each year, we help hundreds of teachers in remote villages more effectively teach children to read and write. We deliver tens of thousands of children’s books to neglected schools and libraries.
We create and improve community libraries and train librarians to be promoters of reading in their villages. We also provide training, materials and support to local organizations that are working to improve educational opportunity for children.
The Child Aid literacy program is effective because there is no better way to improve the quality of education than to improve the skills of teachers. It is sustainable because we invest in local people. It is empowering because it gives children the greatest resource they can possess to lift themselves from poverty: literacy.
Recently we had a chance to see all the wonderful things Child Aid accomplishes, and it was more than we could have imagined. Child Aid employs local staff whose creativity, drive, and enthusiasm fuels the success of the literacy program in their own communities. Everybody’s effort associated with the program (staff, teachers, librarians, parents, neighbors and students) not only accomplishes Child Aid’s education/literacy goals, but also creates an environment whose grassroots enable enrichment in so many other intangible ways that will be passed from generation to generation in Guatemala helping to end any cycle of poverty.
Child Aid is doing fantastic work in the area of childrens literacy in many communities in Guatemala. Their approach, which includes continuous training of their "on the ground" team who then train the teachers and the librarians in the local communities is empowering to so many, and just makes sense. One of the most inspiring things is seeing the kids excited about reading, then teaching other kids, inspiring them, and knowing that being a donor is only one small (but important!) part of the process, with the big work being done by the staff, teachers, librarians and mostly the kids. I highly recommend getting involved!
