Child Aid

Child Aid aims to meet the needs of elementary school teachers and students in Guatemala.  The program represents Child Aid’s primary response to the Covid-19 pandemic, emphasizing immediate, and functionally effective, adjustments to Child Aid’s core teacher training program, with longer-term impacts expected. 

The scope of work will be conducted in three rural and underserved Departments of Guatemala (Chimaltenango, Sololá and Totonicapán).  We are also planning to add capacity in a fourth department (Quiche) during the grant period.  Each location is home to large indigenous populations, the primary beneficiaries of Child Aid’s interventions.  Activities in all locations will emphasize our effective teacher training program, subsequently streamlined, and strengthened by the lessons learned during the pandemic.

The pandemic has had incalculable consequences across Guatemala.  In response, we have developed approaches that will continue to provide value to teachers and students; lead to ways of greatly improving the efficiency of our program; and undergird our confidence in our ability to rapidly scale our work.  Experimentation during the early months of the pandemic helped us identify multiple ways to leverage information technology and other communications platforms to maximize and strengthen both teacher training and student engagement.  

Public school teachers have continued to receive their salaries with the expectation of using virtual teaching methods with content provided by the Ministry of Education.  However, this material is largely inaccessible online to the population we work with, only 10% of whom have internet access

and the few hardcopy worksheets provided by the Ministry are inadequate and difficult to use.  Child Aid uses our virtual coaching sessions to help teachers transform these worksheets into appropriate and appealing assignments that could sent home with children.

Teacher training is at the heart of Child Aid's strategy, and we have moved quickly to turn our in-person workshops into virtual ones.  This has included adding training components to get teachers up-to-speed on virtual technology; experimenting with platforms that enhanced the experience of participation; and making the workshops shorter and thus more “Zoom-friendly.”  In order to better illustrate teaching methodologies and shorten the length of workshops without sacrificing key material, our staff has begun to record short (eight-to-twelve minute) videos modelling the techniques that would be at the heart of each upcoming workshop.  We are distributing these before the workshops, via WhatsApp, as homework.  This has proven very successful, in pedagogical terms, while also saving considerable workshop time. 

The greatest impediment to teacher workshop attendance is data cost.  Working with phone companies, we have been paying to have data minutes automatically added to teachers’ phone accounts.  So far, teacher participation rates to these virtual workshops have exceeded ninety percent.

Since the 1990s, our mission has been to have a substantial impact on changing primary school education in Guatemala thus strengthening these communities and the country, and providing a model for similar work elsewhere.  We emphasize literacy because education has been shown to be the most effective long-term solution for alleviating extreme poverty.  We focus on rural villages where illiteracy disproportionately affects indigenous people, and in the early grades where education can make the biggest impact on literacy and overall life chances.

Child Aid’s primary goal is to improve the education and pandemic-related safety of the children comprising the K-12 student population in the Guatemalan Departments of Chimaltenango, Sololá and Totonicapán.  The populations of all three departments are predominately indigenous. 

The population of Chimaltenango Department (as of 2018) was 615,776, with the majority of Cakchiquel Maya descent. 

As of 2018, the population of Sololá Department was 421,583, almost entirely (96.5%) of Mayan ethnic groups, of which the two largest groups are the Kaqchikel (50.1%) and K'iche' (35.3%).

The population of Totonicapán Department was 418,569 in 2018, with most (97%) identified as indigenous (primarily K'iche' Maya). 

The Child Aid staffing model relies heavily on locally recruited and trained team members.  Our Country Director - Graciela Pichiyá Landa – has been with Child Aid since 2010 and is from Las Canoas, Sololá.  She is indigenous, Mayan, Kaqchikel, has “high professional aspirations” and aims to “be an example for indigenous women and families in Guatemala.”

Child Aid staff work closely with community leaders in their respective regions and are fluent in the local languages.  The twelve-member team in Chimaltenango is predominately comprised of individuals from the department.  The team is 75% female.  

Likewise, the twelve-member team working in Sololá is almost entirely made up of individuals from the department.  As a relatively new program for Child Aid, the team in Totonicapán currently consists of trained staff transferred from Sololá.  However, as the presence in Totonicapán grows, new staff will largely be recruited locally, as has been Child Aid’s policy to date.

Although the Guatemalan government builds primary schools and employs teachers, very little actual learning occurs in these schools.  Primary school teachers generally have only a high school education, and they are all products of the same broken educational system in which they now work.  Schools lack resources which reinforces the use of teaching methods based on rote memorization and copying from the blackboard.

On average, Guatemalans over the age of fifteen have only 5.6 years of schooling.  For indigenous women, that number drops to only 3.4 years.  According to the government’s own data, only 30% of children who stay in school until sixth grade can pass a grade appropriate reading comprehension test, and that is a national average.  The situation in the more indigenous parts of the country is far worse.  Guatemala has one of the highest rates of illiteracy and, not surprisingly, one of the most profound income gaps in the Western hemisphere.

Child Aid’s approach demonstrably improves student comprehension levels by addressing the two major problems affecting primary school education – poorly trained teachers and inadequately resourced classrooms.  We provide a structured, multi-year curriculum based on international best practices, all-school workshops, and individual, in-classroom coaching.  We deliver high-quality, grade appropriate, Spanish language fiction and non-fiction books and help create school libraries and lending programs.  Child Aid has a robust evaluation program, based on assessing outcomes, not merely outputs.   We have shown statistically significant gains in reading comprehension scores of children with Child Aid-trained teachers versus control students. 

“Bridging techniques” address the serious problem of Spanish-language learning for the many students who come to first grade speaking a Mayan language and little Spanish.  Bridging techniques slowly add Spanish-language content as grade levels progress.  We can do this because our staff is fully bilingual in Spanish, as well as the language of the communities where they are assigned schools (at this point, K’iche’, Kaqchikel and Tz’utujil).

The Guatemalan Ministry of Education has certified Child Aid for its ability "to improve educational conditions in various communities of the country, with an emphasis on literacy.”  And Child Aid received the prestigious Library of Congress 2020 Literacy Award for its work in elementary schools in Guatemala.

Child Aid does not usually work directly with students, but we had added some program components because of the pandemic.  Our most successful endeavor has been radio programming.  Radio is by far the most pervasive electronic medium in the communities where we work.  Arranging for the use of a radio station in Patzun, Chimaltenango, we began a weekly radio broadcast of book “read alouds.”  The programs were “call-in,” allowing listeners to interact with the Literacy Trainers who used Child Aid methods to ask questions and receive responses. The program, initially intended to run for six weeks, was so popular that it will continue for the foreseeable future in Patzun, and we will be looking to replicate the program in all of our communities.

Child Aid also does not typically provide humanitarian assistance.  But with the level of catastrophic hunger in our school communities, we have felt obligated to do so.  Purchasing food through United Way-Guatemala we have been providing shelf stable food to families through our schools.  In the past year, with funds raised from our donors and contributed by the Kraft-Heinz Foundation we provided three shipments of shelf stable food to 10,000 individuals.  We will be continuing these efforts for the foreseeable future as well. Child Aid has also been addressing the challenge of non-vaccinated children and teachers returning to class by purchasing and distributing masks and hand gel to schools, which is especially important since the schools do not have running water.

Lessons learned to be applied going forward:

The first key lesson has been about technology.  We have seen that technology can enhance learning and decrease burden on staff in our program. The various, successful technological innovations we discovered through necessity led to the realization that we can shorten our program from four to three years, increasing our efficiency by 25%.

We have also seen that the penetration of, obstacles to use, and appropriate types of technology are not always predictable.  For example, while the percentage of teachers owning smart phones has increased exponentially in the past decade, access to the internet through these phones is limited by the way data usage is purchased and the associated costs. Thus, we were successful in providing our workshops to close to 95% of teachers in our program, but not until we solved their data usage problem by working with the phone companies to purchase data minutes through a laborious process of manually providing 1,000 different phone numbers to the company who could then automatically transfer data availability to the individual accounts.  

In a similar way, we have had very considerable success in reaching students directly, once we ascertained that neither the internet nor television were viable communication methods and switched instead to radio broadcasts.  It is this old technology that has by far the greatest penetration in the areas where we work.  Our call-in radio programs, broadcast in Spanish with segments in community-appropriate Mayan languages, have reached well beyond our school catchment areas.  They have been so popular that we will be continuing them through the fall and into the next school year, contracting with even larger, private radio stations in order to reach more students. 

We believe that the appropriate use of technology depends on a fine-grained understanding of the context, obstacles, preferences, and availability of solutions.  Internet availability (hardware device; penetration of ISPs; and funds sufficient for on-going access) in the homes of rural and underserved communities would be an ideal solution, but it is not realistic in the near term.  Therefore, tenable solutions have to be flexible and practical.  Child Aid has shown the ability to understand the situation on the ground where we work and to adapt creatively and rapidly to work within the parameters of what is possible.

The second key discovery was the nimbleness and creativity of our staff and the strength of our distributed management structure which enabled our three offices to act independently yet still implement our work in a faithful manner.  This radically bolstered our confidence that expansion can occur with increased rapidity, bringing the benefits of our work to a much larger population.

Nevertheless, we remain committed to the value of face-to-face contact.  Teachers have made it clear they want in-person coaching sessions; the ease of our food distribution depended on the interpersonal contacts and trust developed with schools and communities; and data from education studies worldwide affirm the advantages of a hybrid (virtual + face-to-face) modality in creating lasting teacher behavior change and enhanced student outcomes.

Child Aid’s sustainability model:  By not building schools, but rather working in existing public schools; by not replacing but training classroom teachers; by using international best practices explicitly aligned with the Guatemala National Curriculum, our model has built in sustainability – trained teachers will work with new students for years, and scalability – since our costs are our local literacy trainers and not teacher salaries or school construction costs.

The pandemic has shown us the strength of the Child Aid program; its ability to grow; and underscored our belief that our work can help in overcoming the severe inequity that exists in indigenous communities in Guatemala.

Child Aid has demonstrated that remote teacher training can continue to help improve the quality of the education infrastructure during the pandemic, and also to implement greater efficiencies to our teacher training model that will allow for larger numbers of teachers to be trained in a shorter period of time.  This is in large part because of the effective use of technology.  In turn, these outcomes will bolster the capacity for better educational experiences for the predominately indigenous children educated by these teachers.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Child Aid was faced with direct challenges, first in terms of how best to continue to positively impact teachers and students, and second, how to more broadly help the communities we serve in the midst of the harsh realities of the pandemic.  We developed a comprehensive strategy to maintain teacher training and student engagement through virtual platforms, helping children stay engaged and safe and ready for school when it’s time to return.  An unanticipated consequence of the pandemic has been our ability to identify longer-term efficiencies in the transition to virtual training and feedback, and radio programming for direct student programming.  The pandemic also provided a test of how well our three offices could operate in quasi-isolation.  The success as assessed in terms of fidelity of program and maintained cultural cohesion underpin our belief in our ability to grow rapidly in the near future.

Validation of Readiness to Scale:  In order to take the Child Aid program to a greater scale, we must set up multiple, geographically distant offices.  We had been concerned about the challenges this would pose to maintaining cultural cohesion within the organization as well as fidelity of implementation of the program.  The pandemic suddenly required a new level of independence for each office.  The maintenance of organizational cohesion along with the office-level problem-solving that emerged has greatly increased our confidence in a more rapid rate of growth.

Workshop experimentation:  The virtual provision of workshops meant that we were not limited by the difficult geography of Guatemala to holding workshops within each school.  We began to divide workshops by grade level across schools.  This was extremely successful and very much appreciated by teachers.  We are planning to maintain this approach for some of our workshops even when we are not limited by the pandemic.

Increasing Efficiency:  A basic tenet of our program is that our demonstrated success is based on the establishment of relationships of trust and familiarity between members of the Child Aid staff and schools.  Our impact depends on our incorporation into the school community.  The pandemic has made it clear that we can add considerable flexibility and efficiency to our program through the use of technology.  In analyzing our successes this year, we have decided that we can shorten our program from four years to three years after the pandemic and thus increase our efficiency by 25%.

We are using existing technologies which, nevertheless, are new to our staff and the teacher population with whom we work.

Streamlining our workshops:  The difficulties of maintaining participant attention over Zoom, forced us to find ways to shorten our workshops.  In addition to pruning some extraneous materials, our most successful adjustment was the provision of videos ahead of time which would eliminate the need for modeling techniques during the workshop while giving teachers a better sense of what they would be learning.  We are now in the process of creating a library of such videos that will be distributed before each workshop.  We are also considering a larger initiative in which the library of videos, along with supplementary curriculum materials and links, are loaded onto internet-enabled tablets to be presented to each teacher at the completion of the program

Virtual coaching without students present:  Although our inability to enter classrooms was a limitation to our program delivery this past year, it did give us an opportunity to see how much could be accomplished by working with a teacher one-on-one for an hour or more without the chaos of a classroom.  This has led us to develop a plan for the post-pandemic future in which some coaching sessions will remain virtual.  Teachers will videotape classroom sessions in which they are practicing Child Aid materials, send those materials to their Literacy Trainer, and receive specific and targeted feedback via Zoom. 

The technology we are using is widely available and commonly used, especially in developed parts of the world.  Innovation is indicated by our application of the technology in relatively remote, indigenous communities of Guatemala for the demonstrable purpose of improving teaching training, ultimately improving learning by elementary schools students.     

Teacher training is at the heart of Child Aid's strategy, and we have moved quickly to turn our in-person workshops into virtual ones.  This has included adding training components to get teachers up-to-speed on virtual technology; experimenting with platforms that enhanced the experience of participation; and making the workshops shorter and thus more “Zoom-friendly.”  In order to better illustrate teaching methodologies and shorten the length of workshops without sacrificing key material, our staff has begun to record short (eight-to-twelve minute) videos modelling the techniques that would be at the heart of each upcoming workshop.  We will distribute these before the workshops, via WhatsApp, as homework.  This has proven very successful, in pedagogical terms, while also saving considerable workshop time. 

The greatest impediment to teacher workshop attendance is data cost.  Working with phone companies, we have been paying to have data minutes automatically added to teachers’ phone accounts.  So far, teacher participation rates to these virtual workshops have exceeded ninety percent.

Public school teachers have continued to receive their salaries with the expectation of using virtual teaching methods with content provided by the Ministry of Education.  However, this material is ineffective, inadequate and largely inaccessible online to the population we work with, only 10% of whom have internet access.  Child Aid uses our virtual coaching sessions to help teachers transform these worksheets into appropriate and appealing assignments that could sent home with children.

There aren't any risks. 

Between 2010 and 2020, we deployed our program to over 250 schools.  We have 29 Literacy Trainers operating out of three offices in 23 local school districts in three departments (States).  We have served more than 81,000 children and distributed approximately 665,000 books. 

In 2020, just prior to the pandemic, Child Aid was working in 110 schools, serving 974 teachers and more than 20,000 students.

During the next year we expect to:

1) Run 175 workshops (half at the beginning of the school year and again in the middle of the school year) for 974 teachers who teach 20,052 students in the 110 schools in the three departments currently engaged. 

2) Provide approximately 6,000 individual coaching sessions (6 per year for each of the 974 teachers).

3) Distribute approximately 27,000 high quality, Spanish language books to schools and provide rolling bookshelves and an easy classification system to help integrate those books into classrooms and teaching content. 

4) Help set-up or further develop a library and lending program in each school. 

5) Provide hand sanitizer and face masks to all classrooms in the 110 schools.

In five years, we expect to double this level of capacity in five years through expansion to new schools in our three current Departments and through expansion to a new office in the Department of Quiché .

Building on the previous question:

Child aid has seen encouraging growth during the ten years prior to the pandemic.  But we were not satisfied by the level of growth and had ambitious goals for the next 5-10 years.  The education challenges in Guatemala are pervasive, especially for indigenous populations.

A positive, if unintended, consequence of the pandemic has been the increased efficiencies and effectiveness we are building into the Child Aid program and how it is allowing us to grow our reach more quickly and cost effectively.

Activities for One Year:

1) Workshops run: 175

2) Coaching sessions provided: Approximately 6,000 for 974 teachers

3) Distribute approximately 27,000 high quality, Spanish language books to schools and provide rolling bookshelves and an easy classification system to help integrate those books into classrooms and teaching content. 

4) Help set-up or further develop a library and lending program in each school. 

5) Provide hand sanitizer and face masks to all classrooms in the 110 schools.

Indicators:

1)  Number of workshops completed.

2) Number of coaching sessions completed.

3) Number of books and bookshelves delivered.

4) Number of libraries and lending programs created.

5) Percentage of classrooms that receive masks and gel.

Means of Verification:

1) Rosters of workshops entered into Salesforce database.

2) Coaching session completion into Salesforce database.

3) Books and bookshelves delivered entered into Salesforce database.

4) Literacy Trainers' observations of schools and entry of data into Salesforce database.

5) Literacy trainers check each classroom in the schools they work with and enter information into Salesforce database.

Risks and Assumptions:

COVID required presenting our workshops and coaching sessions virtually.  We are assuming that classes will resume in a more normal fashion next school year.  However, we are also assuming that we can continue our program virtually, were that to prove necessary.

Guatemala: 29 full-time staff

US: 5 full-time staff

The Child Aid staffing model relies heavily on locally recruited and trained team members.  Our Country Director - Graciela Landa Pichiyá  – has been with Child Aid since 2010 and is from San Juan Comalapa, Chimaltenango.  She is indigenous, Mayan, Kaqchikel, has “high professional aspirations” and aims to “be an example for indigenous women and families in Guatemala.”

Child Aid staff work closely with community leaders in their respective regions and are fluent in the local languages.  The twelve-member team in Chimaltenango is predominately comprised of individuals from the department.  The team is 75% female.  

Likewise, the twelve-member team working in Sololá is almost entirely made up of individuals from the department.  As a relatively new program for Child Aid, the team in Totonicapán currently consists of trained staff transferred from Sololá.  However, as the presence in Totonicapán grows, new staff will largely be recruited locally, as has been Child Aid’s policy to date.

Our staff is the engine that drives Child Aid and our mission to have a substantial impact on changing primary school education in Guatemala, strengthening these communities and the country.  We emphasize literacy because education has been shown to be the most effective long-term solution for alleviating extreme poverty.  We focus on rural villages where illiteracy disproportionately affects indigenous people, and in the early grades where education can make the biggest impact on literacy and overall life chances.  Child Aid's staff in Guatemala is highly representative of the key constituents we serve.

We are applying for potential financial support and technical assistance and mentoring.  

As a non-profit charitable organization, Child Aid implements a diversified fundraising strategy.  So pursuing appropriate new sources of funding is a requirement for program implementation and sustainability.

However, we recognize that the non-monetary support may help provide the greatest impact in the near term, and over a more extended period of time.

What we know: technology can increase opportunities to train more teacher, in a more efficient and effective way, leading to better education for more children.  We have become more adept at implementing program activities with staff and teachers through Zoom, WhatsApp and iPhone videos.  Direct student engagement through radio programming has been effective.

What we don't yet know: How to improve bandwidth reliability in remote regions without power?  How can we maximize solar-based power generation for better connectivity?  Are there more effective data plan options for teachers?  In what way can we better engage students directly, and teacher-student interaction since students do not currently have internet access?  

We have been studying a variety of models to address these immediate challenges but would very much welcome additional technical expertise and mentoring.

These solutions would have a positive impact on our ability to implement core program priorities among remote locations: teacher training, staff engagement, quality control, data collection, and other functional areas.

We are working to develop our Board of Directors in the direction of a fundraising and advocacy Board and could use advice and assistance in this area.

While we think our marketing materials are very solid, we lack a broad public base and broad donor recognition.  We would use advice and assistance here.

We have a robust evaluation program, spearheaded by a PhD specialist in educational evaluations.  However, we continue to seek help in various aspects of research design and statistical data analysis.

We are beginning to outgrow some of our data systems and could use help reconfiguring our Salesforce database to support our planned expansion.

We are interested in horizontal partnerships with organizations that address issues on "either side" of our focus on primary school education.  Specifically, we are interested in partnership with organizations that address maternal and early childhood malnutrition, since malnutrition has profound and lifelong effects on children's cognitive abilities.  We are also interested in organization that focus on middle school education in Guatemala.  We would like to work together to find ways to bridge the gap between graduating from primary school and continuing on to middle school.

We would be very interested in working with J-PAL (Poverty Action Lab) at MIT.  As a PhD-trained, social scientist, Child Aid's CEO shares J-PAL's concern about demonstrating OUTCOMES rather than merely OUTPUTS of international development.  We believe our rigorous evaluation efforts could both benefit from, and withstand, the type of scrutiny J-PAL employs.