Help Children in Need to Become Leaders of Change

Change in the rural communities happens slow and is prone to be quickly dismissed or forgotten. When aiming to change attitudes, one is looking ahead to a long process in which one needs to involve as many stakeholders as possible to make it sustainable.

In order to ensure the viability of our actions we dedicated an appreciable amount of time to actually present our initiative to the authorities in charge in the rural communities – mayor’s offices, school principals, teachers, parents etc. This action created for us the premises of success in our initiative, as the participants to these meetings understand the importance of such an initiative and also its potential mid and long term effects.

Eventually, after the discussions we had, we decided to stick to three rural communities. They present a higher degree of isolation, which translates to a low level of secondary education amongst the teenagers living there, low access to activities outside school, low access to information and services, and the list can go on. All these lead to limited perspective for the children that grow up in these villages and contribute to create and maintain a vicious circle of poverty and low education.

Once these communities are set, the following period we will continue to do activities in the schools there and with the help of the teachers we will select the children that will make the following groups to work on becoming the leaders of tomorrow.