We chose to begin our work in Guatemala, home to some of the most extreme poverty in the Western Hemisphere, because it has one of the highest rates of illiteracy in Latin America, with one of the lowest percentages of GDP spent on education and consistently ranks as having one of the highest levels of income inequality globally.
The average Guatemalan completes 5.6 grades in school; Indigenous girls stay in school for 3.4 grades. Even for those who make it to sixth grade, government data show that only 30% can pass a sixth grade reading test. Investing in foundational literacy has been proven to have a multiplier effect for a countries development.
Key factors contributing to this failed school system are inadequate teacher training and under-resourced classrooms. We address these problems through a structured, three-year program based on international best practices and aligned with the Guatemalan National Curriculum.
It is also worth noting that 100% of the local staff are from the communities and speak their original Indigenous languages. Through a participatory approach and a learning organization, they have intelligently and intentionally adapted the methodology to best align with the local context.
We provide six all-school workshops, and eighteen in-classroom coaching sessions. We deliver seven, grade appropriate, Spanish language fiction and non-fiction books per student and train teachers to use these books in various content areas. We create school libraries and lending programs. We utilize bilingual “bridging techniques” to address the problem of Spanish-language learning for students who come to first grade speaking a Mayan language and little Spanish. Underpinning all our work is the commitment to literacy as a building block to critical thinking.
The program has now benefited over 223,000 young students, 425 partner schools, 11,402 teachers, and more than 1 million books distributed across Guatemala. Every year, the demand for the program exceeds the resources to scale.
Child Aid was recently chosen to join the Global School Leaders Initiative, Amplifying Leadership. This effort enhances existing programs by equipping school directors with resources and support, which their research suggests can boost learning outcomes in schools by 35%. In 2026, Child Aid will pilot this program in 84 schools.
We are ardent advocates of coalition-building and partnerships. At the community level, we always approach the local authorities to get buy-in. At the federal level, Child Aid has a partnership agreement with the Guatemalan Ministry of Education which has given us access to the existing infrastructure, critical for more rapid expansion.
At the nonprofit sector level, one of the most exciting partnerships is with Voces para la Educación (Voices for Education), a multi-organization network that is made up of eight organizations in the western Highlands (Altiplano region). It is a recently formed coalition which strives to create an articulated platform to share educational needs from diverse experiences and contexts; that may lead to more lasting policy reform within the Guatemalan government.
Unquestionably, yes. While the underlying design of the program continues, since its inception, the organization is committed to quality assurance and continual improvement. As mentioned, the team is locally based and trained. In each of the four regions where the work has expanded to, there are distinct cultural, linguistic, and social aspects that must be considered.
Additionally, with the start of the pandemic, Child Aid decided to further innovate to include radio programming, Zoom and other virtual platforms for distant learning and training. Even with that, across the country, it has been shown that there was significant learning loss, especially for those young people from vulnerable and rural contexts. Child Aid never suspended its work and even invested more in early 2021 to meet the learning crisis.
Most recently, Child Aid is partnering with Project Alianza to understand their off-line literacy app, AnGo which could be part of an exit and sustainable strategy for schools that graduate from the three-year program. We are testing the viability to upload curriculum that would allow teachers to identify student´s reading level and apply the Teaching-at-the-Right-Level (TaRL) methodology.
Child Aid supports cross-organizational learning and would be very open to any initial conversations. There are many aspects of our approach that are transferable and scalable. We have systematized, in Spanish and English, the process from the invitation to participate in a school in Year 1, to the full curriculum of training, coaching sessions, book delivery, lead teacher quality assurance sessions, and more recent exploration of technology-based support.
Of course, we have also identified factors for success, like the “confianza” and persuasion of collaborating with the Ministry of Education, at both federal, district, and municipal levels, with evidence-based outcomes and studies. For instance, we were able to demonstrate that students in Child Aid schools improved their reading comprehension by 65% more than their peers.
While many localized NGOs have bought their own schools, Child Aid has been intentional to build on the existing infrastructure as we believe that can lead to greater impact.
Child Aid’s dedication to program evaluation, and the rigor of our testing/evaluation methodology has not gone un-noticed. Our Director of Evaluation and leadership team have submitted our findings to research publications and travel to various conferences and events to speak about our program and the results that it is yielding.
