|
Thursday, 29 July 2010
Several years ago, we launched the Bike-to-School (BTS) Program as a way to provide incentive for students finishing sixth grade, and also as a way to transport students to junior high school for continuing their studies. Since that time, two things have changed. First, we helped to fund the construction of a new junior high school that is directly next to the primary school in Chanleas Dai. Its proximity means that some no longer need to travel great distances to start seventh grade. Second, we have augmented classes, trained teachers, and worked to improve the overall quality of the education primary students receive, all of which will hopefully provide a more sustainable (and substantive) incentive to stay in school. In a few significant ways, the need for bicycles has been decreased.
In speaking with teachers, students, parents, and principals, however, we realized that a lack of transportation would still be what stopped some students from going to junior high school. To remove this barrier, we have shifted to a scholarship program, wherein students who plan to enter seventh grade can apply for a bike – those who demonstrate need and live outside of a certain radius will be offered one and junior high school teachers will monitor their attendance throughout the year. Hotel de la Paix in Siem Reap generously donated 20 bikes, which have been painted “PEPY green” and await young student riders, who have just heard presentations in their sixth grades before school ends for the summer. In the coming months, we will go through the applications we receive and purchase additional bikes as needed so that all who need one get one. Biking to school is still the goal – we’re just making sure that the program meets needs as appropriately as possible!
Friday, 19 February 2010
By Maria Hach, Program Intern
Here at PEPY we are getting ready to introduce two exciting new programs: Bike Repair Clubs and Leadership for Literacy. Both programs will see students from Chanleas Dai Primary School and Chanleas Dai Junior High School in roles that will encourage confidence building and self empowerment through peer teaching.
Recognizing that our Bike to School Program is likely our least sustainable program—but realizing that a broken bicycle or the lack of a bicycle is often the reason given by students who have dropped out of school or who are absent for a long period—we have decided to modify this program and introduce Bike Repair Clubs. These clubs will provide technical and leadership opportunities for junior high school students who will repair bikes in their school as well as surrounding primary schools. This means that students of all ages who are registered in school can benefit from having their bikes repaired. A micro-lending aspect will also be involved, and this will be managed by club members. Students can pay back the cost of the required bike part in small amounts, on a weekly basis. This means that the family will not need to wait until they can afford to fix their child’s bike, making it possible for the child to keep attending school. Through Bike Repair Clubs, students will not only have the opportunity to learn practical skills, but also enhance their soft skills such as team building, problem solving and critical thinking by working together with their peers. It is a simple yet stimulating idea, and hopefully the kids will have a lot of fun in the process!
The Leadership for Literacy Program begins next month, and involves both Chanleas Dai Primary School and Junior High School. Inspired by PEPY’s Community Program Manager Khouth Awatd, who recognized the significant impact of student-led initiatives, Leadership for Literacy aims to empower young people to make positive changes in their communities through tutoring mentorships. By being paired as tutors to young under-achieving students at the primary school, eighth and ninth grade students will learn how to teach and mentor their peers, while also actively taking part in promoting education in their village. Mentors will be trained on simple teaching methods through engaging and interactive activities. They will then be in charge of planning and scheduling their sessions, and also recording their thoughts after each lesson. While improved literacy will hopefully be an outcome of this program, Leadership for Literacy also aspires to create a young generation of leaders and role models who believes in their ability to improve education in their community. The name says it all, really, and we believe that it has the potential to support young leaders in a very meaningful and powerful way!
Stay tuned as we post pictures and updates from the program!
Wednesday, 16 December 2009
In the past, some of you have asked to give the gift of a PEPY donation in the name of people you love as a holiday gift. This year, we're making that easy for everyone! If you are still looking for gifts this year or can't find the right thing for someone who "has everything," why not choose one of the gifts below? Your friend or loved one will get a unique and thoughtful gift, and together you support PEPY by investing in educational improvements in Cambodia. Not only will we put your donation to good use, we'll also thank YOU (and you friend!) in our own PEPY way, ranging from an email to a video, to homemade cookies (no, really!)
To give the gift of PEPY this holiday season, please visit www.pepyride.org/donate and fill out this form to tell us the names, addresses and phone numbers we will need to deliver our holiday love! For $35 your gift supports a part-time assistant leader for our Child-Club Program for one month. These leaders are young people from the local community, who have been trained in Child to Child methodologies, leadership, and life skills. These dynamic young people were hired because of their enthusiasm, positive attitudes and potential to serve as role models in their community. Meet them here!If you donate in the name of a friend, in addition to supporting rural education:You and your friend will receive an e-mail sent on the date of your choice which lets them know that you have donated to support an assistant leader for a month in their name. We'll also send you both an e-mail in the new year letting you know how many people joined our holiday support team, and details on the Child Clubs. Click here to support an assistant leader for a month!and then fill out this form.For $50 your gift supports one student's participation in our English and XO Creative Learning Class programs for a year. On the date of your choice, PEPY will e-mail you and your friend a personalized certificate with PEPY pictures and logos, information about what their funding supports, and a message telling them that you donated in their name. Alternately, we can e-mail you and you can print it the certificate out to give directly to your friend.
Click here to support a student!and then fill out this formFor $100 your gift supports our Bike-to-School Programwhich is projected to award more than 100 bikes again this year to students entering grade 7. On the date of your choice, we'll email your friend a personalized certificate with program information and custom message. In addition, we will send you and your friend a hand-written thank you card with photos from the Bike-to-School Program ceremony in October.
For $250 your gift supports a 5 day teacher training course on literacy or mathematics for 20 government teachers.
 On the date of your choice, we'll email your friend a personalized certificate with program information and a custom message. In addition, you will be some of the first to receive the PEPY 2010 calendar (which is a bit late this year! Sorry!). You let us know where to send them, and you and your friend will have two calendars to keep you PEPY-fied in 2010! If you like, we'll also send a poem to you and your friend in your honor that incorporates both of your names and your support for PEPY. (If your name doesn't rhyme with anything, we might give you a nickname ;)
For $500 your gift supports an educational field trip temple visit for a class of junior high school students. For 7th graders we plan on visiting the Angkor National Museum, in 8th have environmental projects planned on the Tonlé Sap, and we're still brainstorming with teachers for grade 9! You and your friends can help make these happen! On the date of your choice, we'll email your friend a personalized certificate with program information and a custom message. In addition, we'll send your friend a beautiful silk photo album with pictures from the field trip in the spring of 2010! Plus, if you give us your/his/her phone number, we can call directly from our office in Cambodia during the last week of December, from 6am-10pm Cambodian time (6pm-10am EST). We'll even sing a holiday song of your choice to your friend! Click here to sponsor a field trip!and then fill out this form.For $1500 your gift sponsors a Child Club's activities for a year!Both you and your friend will receive the certificate, program information, and a holiday phone call, plus a semi-annual update from your club, giving information and stories about what the club is doing, an album of pictures from the clubs, and a personalized video documenting the Child Club for both you and your friend. We will also make you cookies. No, really, we will! Just tell us where to send them! We have 15 Child Clubs looking for sponsors… Who wants to take this opportunity to be an important part of our team? 
Click here to sponsor a Child Club for a year!and then fill out this form.Thank you for helping PEPY continue our programs into 2010. Happy Holidays to you!
Tuesday, 27 October 2009
Some people have asked us if our Bike-to-School Program is “sustainable." Clearly, the answer is no! The program will not be continued once we leave, so why did we start it? Is it causing more harm than good? What are the plans moving forward?
Read on to learn why we started this program, why we are continuing it for a bit longer, and how we plan to improve it into something we believe in even more. Our hope is to find the time to write out these program analysis for more programs in the future, so keep on the lookout! PEPY's Program: Bike-to-School ProgramProgram Overview: PEPY provides bicycles to students who are graduating from 6th grade as an incentive for parents to allow their children to stay in school through this point and to provide a means of accessing secondary school. Students must also attend monthly PEPY workshops as well as complete the government's final exam which allows students to enroll in grade 7. If there are students who attend school and the PEPY programs but do not pass the test, PEPY funds a teacher to be a tutor for the summer and the government allows them to retake the test.Stopping, Continuing, or Redeveloping: Redeveloping Internal Program Rating: This program is most likely our least sustainable program, both in the community’s ability to continue the program when PEPY eventually leaves the area and in the program’s ability to improve the capacity of the local community to solve their own problems. Problem: In the areas where we work, most families have only one or more bicycles and the wealthier families have a motorbike. There are two families within the center of Chanleas Dai that have a truck. As many families have only one bike, the parents often need to take the bike to get into the fields. With an average of five children, there is sometimes a need for different kids to go to different schools based on their grade. When students go to primary school, it is typically either only in the morning or only in the evening. When they move on to 7th grade in the lower secondary school, students typically need a bike dedicated just to them as they have to be in school for the full day. A bicycle can be about double the monthly income of a family living in Chanleas Dai. Broken bicycles or the lack of a bicycle is often the reason given by students who have dropped out of school or have taken a long break. Program Goals: Increased attendance. Increased duration of education. Increased enrollment in and completion of both primary school and lower secondary school. Some Factors Considered Before Implementation: We considered the fact that families might sell the bikes or use them for purposes other than sending their kids to school. As primary school completion -- which earns the student the bike -- is one of the program goals, the program will still be deemed successful even if the bike is used for other purposes, as having the child finish grade 6 is a higher level of education than over 50% of people in the commune will achieve. We considered the impact on the local economy; there are no bike shops in the commune, but there are at least two in the nearest town on the main road in the district. We considered buying the bikes from there, but the quality was much lower than those in the city. This is something we can and should revisit for the final years of BTSP implementation. We considered the fact that children and families might move to this village to be able to qualify for this program. As we have seen this already on a small scale, we are changing this program for its final two years to the junior high school, as this will diminish this problem in part. (see below) Alternatives: Nearly every NGO working in government primary school education in Cambodia has some sort of “scholarship program”. The government even took over one of those programs this year, which is a big step for the sustainability of this type of program. Most of these scholarship programs include these components: - a bicycle
- non-formal “fees” paid directly to teachers (these are fees the teacher charges for “extra classes” or to be allowed to take a test and anyone who doesn’t pay them isn’t able to pass. In this way, “free” Cambodian public school is not really free at all.)
- a uniform
- school materials
- some of the more damaging programs also pay parents to allow their kids to stay in school
As other PEPY programs provide for uniforms/school materials and PEPY’s Teacher Award Program removes the non-formal fees, PEPY is in effect providing a scholarship opportunity to all students willing to stay in school. Another issue we have seen in the area, is the lack of transparency available for these NGO groups to choose the right recipients and from what we have seen, they often do not. By making the program accessible to all, motivation becomes a determinant, but we recognize it also means that kids in lower grades who would be in need of such support are not able to access it. Another alternative is to focus on connecting the community to job opportunities requiring education. By making education more valued in the community by drawing direct correlations between increased education and the ability to access higher paying jobs, incentive programs will not be necessary as the incentive will be in the value of the education itself. We very much agree with this, and we are currently pursuing this avenue as well, connecting the community to scholarship programs alternate jobs, hiring local staff to manage PEPY programs, and looking for partners to help bring industry and additional jobs into the local areas. Success: Since the program started, we have seen nearly 1000% increase in 7th grade completion in the community due in part to the BTSP. There are other factors as well, and we are working to strengthen those factors and phase out the less sustainable BTSP, but in the meantime, we believe it is part of the reason Chanleas Dai’s secondary school has over double the amount of students staying on through secondary school than projected by local government officials. Future Plans: When we started this program, we committed to it for a 6 year period and we have done the program for four years. We will continue to run this program for two more years, but are changing it to a JHS based program rather than a primary school program. The difference is slight, but now that we are working more with the JHS, we find it more equitable to provide bikes to all entering 7th graders who can keep the bike for perpetuity as their own once they complete grade 7 rather than providing the bike to only one primary school’s 6th grade. The main way we are improving this program is by phasing it out and replacing it with our Bike Repair Clubs. These clubs will provide skills (both technical skills and leadership opportunities) for JHS students who will then work in small groups to repair bikes in their own school as well as surrounding primary schools. This means that students of all ages who are registered in school can benefit from having their bike repaired. It will also involve a mico-lending aspect. If students do not have the $1.50 needed to buy a new bike tube, then they will be able to put $0.13 down each week until they pay it back. One of the problems we were trying to address with the BTSP in the first place was that students would drop out of school if they didn’t have the funds to repair the broken bikes. In this way, the family does not need to wait until they have saved up to fix their child’s bike but can instead opt to pay back for the repair step by step while their child is still able to attend school. Plus, we can support kids in the lower grades where the highest drop-out rates typically are seen. We’d love to hear your thoughts on our analysis of this program’s “sustainability”. We hope to find the time to do more program analysis like this one, so keep checking back! --- Reminder: If any of YOU, who are reading this post, have traveled with us, or are interested in development, have any questions about our work/decisions or have ideas for how we can further improve our work, we’d be happy to hear them. Feel free to write us an email or add comments/questions below. Remember, KEEN will provide a pair of their fabulous socks each month to someone who writes a comment on our Team Journal! Help us generate more discussions on these topics we feel passionate about, share your ideas to help make us a better organization, and have a chance to have cool socks to keep your feet warm this winter! Or, come help us do all of these things IN Cambodia (where you won’t need the socks anyway, but might want their sandals!)
Saturday, 26 September 2009
By: Daniela Papi, Executive Director
We recognize that many of the projects we have taken on in the past, and even some of the programs we are still doing now, are not “sustainable”. In next month’s newsletter, we will look at how we at PEPY define that over-used-and-not-often-attained concept. We will highlight which of our programs we think are the most “sustainable” based on what we have learned over the past 4 years of implementing PEPY programs and which are the least, and why. We will also examine what changes we are making in some of our actions to make our programs “more sustainable” and in which areas we think “sustainability” is a poorly-defined goal.
All that next month. . . for now, we wanted to highlight a bit of the history of PEPY and the path we have been on as we worked to continually improve our impact. When we first started PEPY, our organization didn’t exist apart from the fundraising we did for other groups’ programs. We funded the first PEPY-backed school through an organization that builds schools all around Cambodia (in partnership with the World Bank, though we didn’t understand those logistics at the time). We funded much more than our original goal in that first year, and eventually co-funded the construction an additional school as well as started an English and Computer program, as that was the next step our partner was willing to facilitate.
What we found when we showed up to see the school we had spent a year funding to build was that it looked like the building might not have been needed after all. The rooms were empty, or half empty, very few teachers were in sight, there were not nearly enough students to fill all of the classes (as our funding provided a new 5 classroom building added to an already existing 7 classrooms). The only class where the teacher showed up regularly was the English/Computer course we had funded. The teacher also happened to be the first college educated person almost anyone in the village had met.
Very quickly, dreams changed from “shop keeper” to “English teacher”, from “finishing grade 6” to “finishing grade 12 and then going to school in Phnom Penh like our English teacher did.” Soon kids were reading in English, writing their names, and sounding out English words on the board. It wasn’t until we decided to try to find a way to do baseline tests of the education levels at the school that we realized that many of the kids who seemed the brightest in English class couldn’t even write their names in Khmer. No one had taught them—or at least they hadn’t had the right techniques, taken the time needed, or found a way to deal with the diversity of levels within their classroom to help the majority of students learn to read.
We soon realized that we were doing a huge “disservice to these students” by helping them learn English before they could learn Khmer, quoting Doug Beacom, a volunteer in Cambodia the time. We also realized we had supported development techniques we no longer believed in: coming in with ideas strictly from the outside, deciding what the “needs” in an area are by limited observations or statistics, and taking action without working with the local communities involved. You might be thinking, “You mean neither PEPY nor the group you worked with ASKED if a school or English program was wanted?” Sure, someone probably asked, but we have learned that asking, when you hold the purse strings, is never enough. The answer will almost always be whatever is perceived to be the right answer to keep the purse strings around. Plus, who wouldn’t want a new school building or English classes when the option was on the table? That doesn’t mean that those things were priorities or actually verbalized “needs” in the area.
We asked ourselves: What use is a $50,000 investment in a school, if students are still not being educated? We looked around at what other groups in the area were doing and tried to find programs that were building the capacity of teachers, not just building schools. We found some great programs, like KAPE, but most of them were working in areas far from Siem Reap. Although we surely weren’t qualified to be making decisions about education in rural Cambodia, we knew that the programs we had been exposed to in the area could be improved upon. We knew we had the opportunity to bring in more funds for education, but didn’t want to build more buildings before we felt confident that the building was housing improved educational opportunities. We would need the power to hire local staff and make our own decisions, so we registered PEPY as its own NGO in Cambodia, and decided to focus more on Khmer Literacy. We began hiring local staff, not merely from Cambodia, but from the areas in which we were working, as we learned that the urban/rural divide was nearly as insurmountable a chasm in some cases as the foreign/local divide.
We recognized that there were barriers to the opportunity to access schools, and began perhaps our least “sustainable” program, the Bike-to-School Program (BTSP). Rather than focusing solely on the more long term and arduous process of building up school programs to the point where education is at a high enough quality that would garnish increased outside demand for the programs, we grew impatient and wanted to make sure that the kids in the village could access school NOW, so we started the BTSP. We recognized that students needed to “earn” the bike, but our efforts to make that seem to be the case meant we kept the bike as a carrot for 6th grade completion, even though the majority of students were being lost way before that point.
We saw that new schools and bikes and more student attendance did not increase the level of education being offered at the school, and that investing in teachers was the key area we needed to focus on. We debated what support we should give to government teachers. When would we be undermining the responsibilities of the government and when would we be asking too much of people not paid enough to commit to doing their jobs full time? We began looking for any teacher training opportunities we could find, but found that it was much easier to find “Origami Training Classes” (not joking!) than early literacy classes and much easier to find funders to build schools than it was to find programs designed to help teachers improve. We hired more of our own staff and began to design our own training programs while at the same time grabbing any opportunities we could find for outside training.
Many ideas still came from “the outside”, and many still do. We had internal debates about when that was ok, and when it wasn’t. Some of us thought it was ok to bring in new concepts like starting a “literacy camp” when the idea of a summer camp was a foreign concept, while others advocated community-led decision making and research methods like PRAs (Participatory Rural Appraisals) rather than surveys. We tried both. We hired a Cambodian manager for our programs, and she brought her own ideas for sustainability, focusing on developing the capacity of the community’s young leaders. She brought us the Child-to-Child program, which she had been trained in many years prior and conducted our first PRAs. We began to learn what the community thought of our programs, how they really ranked their own needs, and what ideas they had for the improvements they wanted to be a part of.
We began to see change, incrementally. A library program and later a literacy program began to change how children viewed books and how the classrooms were used during free time. Teachers began to request that PEPY conduct training on this or that rather than the requests for radios, tv’s, and teacher laptops we had previously heard. Teachers started coming to school more often, in many cases nearly twice as often, and students stayed in school longer.
And yet, we were still giving stuff away with limited accountability or investment from the community and making many decisions without community involvement. It’s hard to be patient. Our programs seemed to have diverged down two paths, the “invest in the now and see results soon: in this class, in this person, in THIS generation” path, and the “don’t do, teach; don’t give, inspire: incremental change will happen” path. In many ways, we are still moving along both of these paths, something we will discuss further next month in this series.
Next month we will look more critically at the design of our programs and answer the question: What is PEPY doing now, and how “sustainable” do we think those programs are? In the meantime, thanks for YOUR part in the learning outlined above. Thank you for teaching us, supporting us, and allowing us to change and adapt our programs as we find new and better ways to improve the opportunities for rural communities to provide high quality education to their students. And thanks for continuing to push us to learn more and be more responsible. One of the best lessons we have learned over the last four years has been that we can ALWAYS do things better, and that when we become complacent and think “it’s good enough” we lose our ability to strive for great changes. For our part in this newsletter, we will continue to strive to keep you informed about our work and provide a more critical look at the decisions we are making, if you will promise to keep reading. See you next month!
(For those who ARE reading this, why don’t you make a comment about our work and enter our contest to win free gear from Eagle Creek?!)
|
