buildOn Awarded $8.5 Million Grant from Educate a Child

buildOn has been awarded an $8.5 million grant from Educate A Child (EAC) to build schools for 40,000 out-of-school children in Haiti, Senegal, Mali, Malawi, Burkina Faso, and Nepal.

This is the largest grant buildOn has received to date and will dramatically increase the reach of our school building programs worldwide. Through a co-funded model, EAC and buildOn will build 520 schools over the next four years.

In addition to dramatically increasing the number of schools we are building, we will also be enhancing our methodology to reach even more out-of-school children in the communities where we work.

Some strategies include:

– Adjusting the Covenant between buildOn and partner communities to include a commitment by the community to identify and enroll out-of-school children
– Creating a program, modeled on buildOn’s Adult Literacy Program, to help children who have not attended school in the past catch up to their peers so that they may successfully transition into traditional schools
– Building latrines for both girls and boys at every school, because girls are more likely to attend schools with gender-specific facilities

As part of this new initiative we are also working with communities where we have previously partnered to increase enrollment. For example, on April 20-24 we are holding a training session for 180 representatives (50% of whom will be women) from 90 communities from across Mali. The goal of this session is to give each participant the skills to return to their community and lead the efforts in their village to enroll students who are not currently attending school. The training will focus on the rights of children, identifying the causes for children not being in school, and strategies for returning them to school.

EAC is a program of Education Above All, a global initiative founded in 2012 by Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser of Qatar to build a global movement that contributes to human, social and economic development through quality education. Educate A Child’s partnership with buildOn is an example of its momentum to achieve its target of reaching 10 million out of school children by 2016.