How partnerships pave the path to literacy
By: Michael G. Dougherty, PoP CEO
At Pencils of Promise, we celebrate education by building primary schools in the rural developing world. In small communities across Ghana, Guatemala and Laos, we make sure that young children have a safe and dignified space to learn, that their schools have clean water and private bathrooms and that they learn how to read and write. We believe that every child should have a quality education — no matter where they were born, no matter what zip code, no matter which country — and we believe that anyone can play a part in making it happen.
That said, 250 million children around the world lack basic reading and writing skills. That’s an enormous number, and one that seemed daunting when I left a 30-year career in for-profit education last June to become PoP’s CEO, with hopes of changing the future for the world’s most vulnerable young students. Bringing quality education to all, the mission driving Pencils of Promise, may be the most challenging work with the highest stakes I have ever taken on.
Nonetheless, I’m able to stay positive about the task at hand because at the end of the day, we know how to teach children to read. The ability to hear, identify and manipulate letters, sounds and words can be taught, cost effectively, and with very high success rates. Compared to so many other of the world’s problems where the solution is not yet known, we can be fully positive about the outlook for literacy education.
The reason for that? At PoP, we believe — above all —that in order to build literacy leadership among educators and practitioners in both industrialized nations and developing countries, we must build partnerships.
Teachers, students and communities are receptive to PoP’s literacy interventions because of the authentic, equal partnership we establish with local communities, national Education Ministries and regional governments. We do together what no one partner could achieve alone.
To build literacy leadership, we need to create partnerships from the ground up. That means establishing relationships with parents, who we view as equals in the education process. Because we hold community partners accountable for their contribution to a school, PoP builds primary schools for entire communities, for all students and parents to share and feel ownership. This sense of “buy in” lends itself to success in the classroom — if parents believe in the value of their children’s education, we are surely more likely to see positive results.
Particularly in developing countries, empowering and encouraging local staff is also crucial to creating literacy leadership. Each of our Country Directors are from the country they lead and knows their country best — our role is to support their visions, not impose our own. PoP team members speak the local languages of communities, spend months there during the school builds and visit at least monthly thereafter. Our teams on the ground deeply understand the local context of the literacy programs we’re implementing, and they’re committed to working through any challenges that arise in a way that best fits their specific environments. Local leadership helps create scalable solutions to solve the literacy crisis at the community level, in a way that makes the most sense for our students and teachers.
Speaking of teachers — our first priority is to support teacher success and we believe teachers need feedback on student progress. PoP’s teacher support program allows a teacher to see real-time progress in the classroom, in order to validate where our interventions are succeeding and where students need additional support.
Finally, partnerships with other organizations are an essential ingredient in successful literacy programs. From my own for-profit background and perspective, I’m blown away by how few real partnerships there are in the nonprofit world. One way to get bigger, faster results is to partner together as NGOs trying to solve big problems. Changing the world is a highly fragmented cause with too much duplication of efforts — and not enough coordination. At PoP, we’ve partnered with organizations like WorldReader and Rumie in order to maximize our impact in a way that might not be possible on our own. And we seek other partnerships to provide holistic development to benefit children in PoP communities.
250 million children can’t read or write. At PoP, we’ve prioritized teacher support and authentic partnerships to change lives and create endless possibilities.
