This young girl is just one of the many students who make up Meno’s 100% enrollment rate.
When Beyond Borders’ partner Limyè Lavi began working with leaders in the rural, mountainside village of Meno 6 years ago, the town’s enrollment rate was comparable to the national average of only 1 in every 2 children in school.
Today, for the second year in a row, 100% of Meno’s children are enrolled in school.
To boot, of the 15 students eligible to take the national exam for entry into high school, all passed.
As significant as those feats are, they are just a few parts of Meno’s long-term plan to create a better-educated, more economically-stable community in which no child is sent away to live in restavèk, a form of modern slavery affecting 250,000 Haitian children.
At the initial meeting six years ago, Limyè Lavi asked Meno’s leaders to prioritize their community’s most pressing needs. The agenda they presented without any input from outside organizations included agricultural production, education, and children’s rights.
Improving Meno’s community school – with its dilapidated buildings and teachers who hadn’t been trained or paid in months – was quickly identified as highest on the list. It was a priority in keeping with Beyond Borders’ support for the movement to guarantee universal access to quality education in Haiti.
Thus, a partnership was birthed which today includes education initiatives such as a tuition-match program, Accelerated Education for children who missed starting school because their families are too poor or they had been sent away to live in restavèk slavery, and a book bank that makes textbooks affordable.
Meno’s successes are what happens when Haitians–supported by Beyond Borders’ followers like you–are empowered to lead the revitalization of their communities.
In essence, they created for themselves a model community, a place moving quickly in the direction of an ideal vision for rural Haiti.
Meno is the organization’s oldest Model Community, and today there are 11 others.
Both Beyond Borders’ and Limyè Lavi’s goal is to see every one of them achieve successes like those realized in Meno.
With your generous support for the movement to guarantee universal access to quality education, we are confident the successes of Meno will be duplicated over and over again.
