Haiti's Education System Still in Shambles After 5,000 Schools Destroyed

I spent the last six weeks volunteering for Hands On Disaster Response (HODR) in Leogane, Haiti (a city west of Port-au-Prince that sustained even greater damages than the capital), clearing rubble, building schools and shelters, working with kids, and documenting it all as best I could.

Much of what I saw was heartening, but so much more was heartbreaking: abject poverty, hunger, squalor, massive destruction that has yet to be addressed, political corruption, deforestation, and a pervasive culture of foreign-aid handouts and projects that, in some cases, cripple Haitians rather than empower them.

As someone who believes in the power of education to create opportunities and to lift people out of poverty, what I learned about the Haitian education system (or lack thereof) was also pretty painful.

The numbers I've heard and read vary slightly, but the ballpark number of schools destroyed in January's earthquake runs up to 5,000. Even with financial resources, this is a lot of rubble to remove. One school that I helped HODR clear the rubble for, Nicole Kindergarten, is still functioning only because the school's director managed to keep another job and shovel all of his savings as well as donations from friends and family living abroad into pitching a tarp, paying a pittance to the teachers, and giving his small charges a little food.

I spoke with NGO project coordinators, school principals, teachers, and students, and here's what I learned about Haitian education:

1) 90 percent of all schools in Haiti are private. The state can't be trusted to run much of anything, let alone functioning schools. This prevents a huge number of Haitian children from attending school at all, since private schools must charge fees, however nominal, and a shocking percentage of local people scrape by on a few dollars a day. We complain about the failings of the U.S. public education system, but at least there is one.

2) Illiteracy rates were at nearly sixty percent before the earthquake. I'd say this has a lot to do with access; especially in rural areas, schools are few and far between, and according to UN statistics, primary school tuition can often represent forty percent of a family's income, forcing them at the very least to choose which of their children they'll send to school.

3) Most teachers who are working in still-functioning schools are doing so on a voluntary basis. I heard that there was a large chunk of funding that went (or will go) to the Haitian government specifically for education, and more specifically to pay those teachers who've been volunteering all year, but it's unclear where that money is and which schools will get it once it does get doled out.

4) The obstacles to building new schools in Haiti also abound, believe it or not—from what I could glean, despite the fact that the state runs very few schools, they still have a say in how new schools are built. Only 'transitional' school structures are accessible to NGOs looking to build, therefore, despite the fact that kids have been wandering the streets now for six months and thousands of schools are still mountains of rubble without room even to pitch a tent alongside.

It does seem that the broken-down education system in Haiti is one of those deep-set, intractable problems that existed before January's earthquake and will persist in keeping economic development and basic human rights at bay unless it changes drastically. A recent RAND report on the state of the Haitian disaster emphasizes what, perhaps, Haitians needed all along: stronger state institutions so that they can rebuild their lives from the inside out.

What can we do? We can all take a couple of weeks to go down and pick up a shovel, believing in the one-rock-at-a-time grassroots method. We could donate funds to organizations like HODR that are building schools, or to larger organizations like UNICEF, Save the Children, or other members of the Haiti Education Cluster in order to pick up the pace of school builds and teacher hires. We could simply keep our fingers crossed that whatever happens after November's election will lead to greater concern for public education and less siphoning of money out of the hands and mouths of the Haitian people, but even the Haitians don't seem prepared to do that.

The good news is that those schools that are still running are being run by dedicated, compassionate people who are going to amazing lengths to provide what little they can to Haiti's children. I met a few of them, and sincerely hope that some of those billions in foreign aid can reach their capable hands.

(Pictured are two girls who were able to attend Nicole Kindergarten tuition-free since the spring and eat a daily meal of rice and beans, all thanks to donations. It's unclear what will happen next, however. HODR is helping the school acquire a UNICEF tent to house a few more students going forward, but that doesn't do much to cover expenses.)

Photo credit: Sara Bernard