Background information on Peruvian education (Ref: UNICEF, Inter American Development Bank and papers and publications available from concerned NGOs)

There is strong statistical evidence to demonstrate that in order to develop economically an undeveloped country must invest a minimum of 6 percent of it’s GDP in education. This has been borne out in many countries from Asia to Central America. The Peruvian Government has promised to earmark an insufficient 3 percent of GDP into education but in fact only channels a paltry 2 percent. This lack of investment in education means that schools are under funded, teacher’s salaries are too low to attract competent people into the profession, and that not enough money is available to help children from the poorest families with scarce resources into education.

South America has an infamous reputation for high rates of child labour and Peru has the worst record on the continent. From a population of around 25 million, 11 percent of children in rural areas and 6 percent in urban areas, work. This equates to millions of children who are missing out on their education in order to supplement their family’s income in a country where 49 percent of the population live in poverty.

Education is proven to be the best way to lead a country towards development and for this reason we want to help children enter the education system thus giving them, their families and ultimately the country as a whole the chance of a better future.

Within Peru some regions show up worse than others and Trujillo is a black spot in terms of poverty and child labour. The charity we are related to, Bruce Peru, is located in this town and for this reason we are beginning in this area.

The overriding reason why children do not take part in the education system is that their family does not have sufficient resources to provide for its subsistence. Children are forced to work because it is a necessity and education is looked upon as a luxury by the parents who are themselves uneducated. The children are sent out to work in the informal sector selling or doing menial tasks in order to contribute towards their family’s desperate income. If a family were to take their children out of the realm of economic remuneration they may be even less able to cope financially with the reduction in income.

Although it is said that education is free in Peru parents must still find an annual registration fee, and pay for their children’s uniforms and books. While this is only a small expenditure it is often prohibitively expensive for poor families, especially if they have a number of offspring. While the economic situation of these families remains the same studying becomes an impossibility from which the children loose their chance of a future.

It should be noted that many parents send their children out to work although they could manage economically, if with great difficulty, without the income provided by the child. A principle reason why a parent might do this is the lack of value placed on education especially by those who are uneducated themselves and have no direct experience or knowledge of the benefits of education. Through these eyes education maybe misconstrued as a waste of time and mean that parents see the child bringing money to help with the family income as a far more important employment of their time. Such ideas may have a bad influence on children who may also undervalue education and fail to see the beneficial key that it holds to their futures.

For some parents who have problems with alcohol, drugs or simply do not want to work themselves, children can often be the only vehicle through which they earn their income. These parents will form an obstacle for the project because they are not interested at the present time in their children’s future and will be less cooperative than those that are.

Older children who have not previously taken part in the education system will find it increasingly hard to do so as they get older and lag further and further behind their contemporaries. A child who is considerably behind other children of the same age group may suffer from low self-esteem and decide to stop studying. Children who come to school later in life may also have behavioural problems which mean that authorities can not accept their disruption in the school.

The issues and potential solutions are identified below:-

Solution

• Help with food costs by putting them in contact with free restaurants where their children can eat in return for attending school.

• Help families with the costs involved with sending their children to school such as inscription fees, school uniforms and books.

2. Parents place a low value on education, probably due to their own lack of it, and prefer their children to add to the family income.

Solution

• Meet with groups of mothers to expound the benefits of education and to explain our project and educate the parents about the value of education for their children’s and possibly their own future.

• Through forums with mother’s groups with speakers from involved organizations, and also with talks by some good examples of children who have successfully made the change from work to education and on to a formal position of employment.

Solution

• Seek counselling for parents and provide extra support and monitoring to ensure children enter the education system.

Solution

• Educate the children directly about the benefits to them through meetings and constant contact with volunteers from the participating organizations.

• The children need to speak to some children who were once in their situation and through education have become successful. This will help the children to realize the potential they actually have.

a) Older children will be behind others of their age group which could lead to low self-esteem and a decision by the child that education isn’t for them or poor behaviour that is unacceptable in a school environment often foreign to the children in question.

Solution

• Remedial classes to prepare children for the behaviour which will be expected of them and to help raise their current learning level.

• Build close links with the schools throughout the project will also ensure that the children will be given a chance and not expelled at the first problem.

b) Some children simply do not have a sufficient academic capacity and as a result signing them up for school may be a waste of their time. This certainly does not mean that they have no hope to get out of the situation that they are in, but that alternatives must be found.

Solution

• Vocational training so that the children can learn skills which will be valuable to their future in the world of formal work, and which will hopefully result in formal employment at its completion.

At the headquarters in the centre we offer free breakfast and lunch to street children or to poor children whose parents don’t have enough money to feed them properly. When eating with us the children are in contact with our volunteers and can be put in touch with medical, dentistry, and psychological care which we also provide for free. Many of these children don’t attend school so we also offer as many classes as possible which are given by our volunteers.

Many of the children who come to us have spent time on or currently live on the street and many have become addicted to drugs, especially to solvent abuse. It is beyond our capacity to take 24-hour responsibility for these children, but our volunteers and social workers find help for them where possible in other institutions that specialize in children with such problems.

We have also started and supported other projects outside of our headquarters in the city of Trujillo and it’s outskirts. It has been a big supporter of Mother’s Clubs, which are organisations formed by mothers to deal with the immediate needs of mothers and their children. They need an area where they can meet, cook and distribute food to all their members and in numerous cases we have renovated dilapidated buildings for this purpose, and has contracts to administer 15 mother’s clubs located in the principal barrios surrounding Trujillo. To these same Mother’s clubs and to many more, we have directly distributed huge food donations which we have received from agro industrial companies, thus ensuring that such donations reach the most needy.

In order to fund these endeavours we sell food to adults at very low prices in a different part of our restaurant which gives us some income and also means that the poor of the area can eat well and within their budget. We also have an English academy which runs in the evenings where volunteers give their time to teach locals English and to earn money for the projects.

While the work we are doing is helping those we can reach we recognize that this is a somewhat paternalistic assistance and that in order to really make a difference in this city and in the country as a whole we need to attack the causes and not just the symptoms.

The project has a simple aim: to get as many children as possible to take part in education and thus give these children the chance of a better future and therefore the country the chance to develop. Any entity which assists us with our work will be helping to bring about a change in the mentality which accepts that children must form part of the workforce, and to bring about real changes for the children and the community as a whole.

A child who grows up without education working in the informal sector of selling sweets, cleaning shoes etc has little chance to improve himself in the future and will offer nothing to benefit the development of his community. Also it is often the case that these children then fall into a life on the streets. The project is targeted directly at these children as we aim to convert them from workers into students in the hope that we can break the cycle and in turn give their future generation a better start.

We began the project by collecting information about the location and particular problems of the working children that are to be helped through their link with the Mother’s Clubs.

Meetings have been held with the regional coordinators of these clubs and with many of the presidents in order to explain how the project will work and how we want to work with them in order to realize the desired result. In all cases the proposal was greeted with enthusiasm, gratitude and offers of full cooperation. These people feel very marginalized by society and the government and are desperate to be active participants in any project that will have obvious benefits to them or to their children.

Through the vehicle of the Mother’s Clubs we have access to hundreds of poor working children whose whereabouts and circumstances we will be aware of and who we will be able to assist in the next stage of the project.

Once the data collection stage of the project was completed we moved on to the next and most important phase which is converting working children from a life of menial work into students.

In the second stage we began to attack the circumstances which are keeping these children out of education and forcing them into informal work.

Manpower is provided by our international and local volunteers; by student volunteers who we will recruit as necessary, and by local community leaders, members and organizations who can play a part in realizing this project.

The project involves Arriba Ya at a local level but as the majority of the local population is in itself poor, funds required to support this projects endeavours to assist children into school, requires outside assistance.

The project will require funding to:

1. Pay the inscription fees for children whose families can not afford it
2. Provide children with uniforms, books and other equipment
3. Administration costs in setting up remedial educational facilities to prepare children for schooling where appropriate.
4. Administration costs in setting up informal education facilities and vocational educational facilities

School registration year starts each March.

July to December of the year before the children will enter school.

• Make contacts with Mothers Clubs and Schools
• Collect information about working children.
• Analyse data to see the distribution of children who we can help through this project, and relating this data to suitable and available institutions: take decisions on which children we should ask to have places reserved for the following year.
• Set up remedial classes for those who need to catch up to the children who will be their peer group when they enter school.
• Help mother’s who are interested to apply for and attain loans to start businesses to replace the income of their offspring.
• Reserve places in the appropriate schools for all the children in our program we intent to matriculate the following March.

January to February of the year they are scheduled to enter school.

• Make preparations for children to be matriculated.
• Purchasing for later distribution of books, books and supplies

March

• Matriculation of children into school

March 2004 onwards

• Constant monitoring and follow up work to ensure that the children remain in education and to deal with and overcome any problems which they may encounter, expecially problems relating to their home and family environment.

• Child registration - It will cost 40 soles to register each child in school for a year.
• Uniforms - The cost of a school uniform (including regullation shoes) is roughly 103 soles per child per X 2 uniforms per school year = S/206 per year.
• Books - It will cost 40 soles to provide children with books every year.
• Additional expenses - Above to the costs listed thus farroughly 50 soles will be needed to cover costs for other school equipment, sports clothing and event fees; transportation (required for children who must commut to school, we estimate, averages out at S/80 per year.
• A total of between$110 and $125 per year per student.

This project will bring huge benefits to the children, their families and their local community – potentially this and similar projects could eventually affect the region and Peru as a whole.

The children will be given the chance to escape the cycle of poverty and the lack of future that work in the informal sector brings, and with a good educational base will have the chance to find a valuable future in the formal sector. The prosperity of ones children should be a basic concern for any parent, but in addition to this, parent’s will benefit from the security of children who will have the means to provide for them in their old age.

Long term, an educated workforce is also a more productive one and therefore Peruvian companies will have incentives to set up or remain. The same applies on a national level with international companies being attracted by an educated workforce. Here we see that education can attract jobs, economic prosperity and thus development to a country facing the problems Peru faces today.