2. Promoting Alternatives to Servitude

Model Communities

Children are driven into servitude by the forces of despair and false hope. By raising awareness of the risks facing children sent into servitude, we help eliminate the false hope that tempts rural families to send children into servitude.

But rural life is so very hard in Haiti. Many of the poorest families, even when learning of the risks facing children in servitude, still feel compelled by despair to send their children away. For this reason, the Campaign is working to give poor rural families more choices and to support community-driven initiatives that will inspire hope and provide concrete improvements to rural life.

Rural Schooling: Only about half of Haiti's children attend school. The lack of affordable, quality schooling is especially severe in rural areas and drives many families to send children into servitude. Rural parents know that without an education, the chances for their children to escape extreme poverty are very limited. They see that there are more schools in towns and urban areas and are sometimes to eager to believe the promises of brokers and urban families to send their children to school (promises that are only rarely fulfilled).

Beyond Borders already supports a number of initiatives that promote wider access to schooling and higher quality education in rural areas (the Child Literacy Program, Schools Alive, Circles of Change, the Matenwa Community Learning Center).

The Campaign has started this year to develop model rural communities where access to education is available to all children. Universal education for Haiti's children is guaranteed by the Haitian constitution. But the Haitian government's Ministry of Education lacks both the resources and technical capacity to provide anything close to universal education. Fewer than ten percent of Haiti's school-aged children attend government supported schools. So, these communities will be places where we encourage collaboration between local leaders and representatives of the Haitian government and develop models of intervention that can be replicated in other communities, moving Haiti closer to being able to provide education to all its children.

We plan to provide scholarships to rural schools especially for children who have been sent into servitude. Parents will be encouraged to retrieve children who they have sent away and return home with them where they will have the opportunity to attend school and potentially benefit from other services. We believe, based on interviews with parents and anecdotal evidence, that this will give many parents all the encouragement they need to retrieve the children they've sent into servitude.

Finally, providing education in rural Haiti has an added advantage. Educating poor children, especially girls, has been shown to be one of the most effective and cost effective ways of reducing fertility rates, delaying first pregnancies, and reducing family sizes. Smaller families are less likely to send children into servitude.

Rural Community Development: There are other aspects of rural life beside the lack of schools that lead families to despair and the fateful decision to send children away into servitude. These include hunger, the lack of health care and a basic rural infrastructure, ecological degradation, and few economic opportunities.

In the model rural communities the Campaign will be developing cooperative relationships with organizations that provide micro-finance, health care, training in sustainable agriculture, nutritional support and other services to rural communities. To the extent possible we will seek to engage the Haitian government in the various interventions we undertake so the experience can be an apprenticeship in collaboration and be replicated in other communities.

By working collaboratively with other organizations and the government, we can better leverage our limited resources to help the poorest rural families most susceptible to sending children into servitude.

Adult Education: Outside intervention can only go so far. The most important partners in bringing lasting change to rural communities are the people of these rural communities. They must be equipped to lead the development of their communities, to see opportunities where once they only saw obstacles, and to work together to form and realize a common vision for their future.

Adult education and popular education are key to this kind of bottom-up change. So, in collaboration with other Beyond Borders programs and other organizations, we will offer a variety of educational opportunities for the adult population of these rural communities--adult literacy training, participatory leadership development, training in parenting and children's rights, sexual and reproductive health, sustainable agriculture, etc.

Previous Page

Next Page