Child Literacy Program

Offering Quality Education to Haiti's Most Disadvantaged Children

It is almost impossible to get a good education in Haiti. For the poorest children it is very difficult to get any education at all. Only about half of Haiti’s children ever attend school. Most who do never graduate from primary school; and only 38 of every thousand students complete high school.

Although education is technically compulsory, public schools are few and far between and terribly overcrowded, sometimes with over a hundred students in a single class. As a result, about 80% of all students attend private schools. Poor families will go without food or other necessities to pay tuition for a child to attend a school that is also often overcrowded and where the quality of education is usually quite poor. Still, the tuition and fees these schools charge put them out of reach for poorer families.

A child who grows up unschooled and illiterate in Haiti has little hope of escaping extreme poverty. Even worse, children who are unable to attend school are far more likely to be sent away by their desperate parents to live in domestic servitude. These children--called restavèks or stay with's--are typically abused, neglected, and worked mercilessly. Many are trapped in a modern form of slavery.

Through the Campaign to End Child Servitude, another Beyond Borders initiative, we are working to end this practice. But often, all that is needed to keep a child from being sent away into servitude is the opportunity for the child to attend a good school in his or her home community.

Through our Child Literacy Program, Beyond Borders provides some of Haiti's most vulnerable children with a solid basic education that is designed to help them escape poverty and reduce the chances of being sent into servitude.

The cost of providing a child in Haiti with schooling varies from place to place, but in most underserved communities the cost of providing a full year of elementary school is just over $100 per student.

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