Pencils of Promise, Inc.

250 million of the world's primary school aged children lack basic reading, writing and math skills. Poor, unsafe infrastructure, untrained teachers and preventable illnesses are all barriers to quality education, especially for children living in rural, developing communities. In our countries of impact, Ghana, Guatemala and Laos, students and teachers lack the resources and tools proven to overcome these barriers. In Ghana, 28% of primary school students will drop out before completing primary school. In Guatemala, four years is the average length of schooling for a child. And in Laos, 30% of the population is illiterate, with even higher rates of illiteracy amongst ethnic minorities. Students in these communities attend class in dilapidated structures or outside, under the shade of trees, rather than in formal schools. Teachers in these communities lack formal training and don't have a support system in place to help them become effective educators.

Pencils of Promise (“PoP") provides the means, methods and materials necessary to increase literacy rates in the developing world. We build primary schools to ensure students have safe access to a structurally sound, quality learning environment. We train and coach teachers, implement WASH (Water, Sanitation & Hygiene) and provide innovative in-classroom programs to create a scalable model for a complete, high-quality education. Our teacher training workshops model effective classroom practice and high-engagement instruction. We build safe and clean bathrooms and teach students about WASH to keep them healthy and in school. We integrate e-readers and tablets into our programming with the goal of achieving basic literacy for 90% of students by the end of grade six.

PoP will have proven interventions that increase student outcomes in high-need areas with the ultimate goal of scaling these interventions through community and government partnership and adoption.

In partnership with governments, PoP will provide access to safe, local primary schools, install evidence-proven programs, invest in teacher quality and assess student progress in high-need rural areas in Laos, Ghana & Guatemala. PoP will curate and adapt innovative teaching methods to create engaging, child-centered learning environments that foster whole child development in full alignment with national curricula and standards.

Over the years, we have grown our staff and ensure that the skills and expertise required to achieve our outcome and output goals are accounted for. We employ specialists in our core program areas (Teacher Support, WASH, Builds and Learning & Evaluation) to ensure that our internal team is fully equipped to effectively and efficiently carry out our programs. Additionally, we rely on a strong network of peer organizations to learn how other organizations achieve their goals and to share best practices throughout our industry.

Since our founding in Laos a little more than 10 years ago, we have built over 535 schools across Laos, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Ghana and serve nearly 110,000 students. Moving forward in the next 10 years, we aim to have 100% program (Teacher Support and WASH) coverage in all PoP built schools. It is projected that we will reach 75% coverage in just five year, paving the way to 100% coverage in years following.