Project document New education project Results Process: Distribution of books Prebásica 2007 (pdf 1.5 MB) (s ) World Bank activities on education in Latin America

The Minister of Education, Marlón Brevé, states that with the support of the Education Project “the country is well underway in acheiving the goals set by the Education For All Program (EFA) as well as the Second Millennium Development Goal.  The children that are enrolling this year are the ones that will finish in 2015. Public schools in Honduras now have textbooks for the basic subjects -Spanish, Mathematics, Social Studies and Science- which give the children better access to knowledge. Approximately1.7 million textbooks for Social Studies, 1.3 million textbooks for Science and 180,000 textbooks for intercultural bilingual education have been distributed throughout the country.” 

Rony Leonidas Castillo Guity is the Coordinator of the National Program for Autochthonous Ethnic Groups of Honduras (PRONEEAH). He started working with the program when its annual budget was limited to 20 thousand dollars and has witnessed the impact of the Community-Based Education Project: “The Project was crucial for PRONEEAH to achieve relevance. The pressure to reach the school room with an intercultural bilingual education was significant, but we were clear that the important thing was not only to reach the schoolroom but to do it with quality.  It was necessary to start with a properly designed national basic curriculum; foremost in the list was the preparation of textbooks in each of the seven different languages of the ethnical groups in the country. Thereafter we had to train teachers that could work with these textbooks.  Once the teachers were trained we were ready to reach the schoolroom.”

PRONEEAH is the result of an initiative of the Confederation of Autochthonous People of Honduras (COMPAH) which formally requested the government to develop a program for the indigenous populations. The Legislative Decree 98 of 1992 paved the way for the creation of the program. Rony Castillo explains that “even before the government’s approval some research and recovery activities had been undertaken by certified speakers in the communities.  All the languages already had their graphemes and consultations with local certified speakers were carried out in cases where there were discrepancies.  Luckily there has been a good acceptance by the federations as there has been excellent integration with the bilingual communities.  In some communities there is still resistance but since the federations have embraced the texts the experience is guaranteed.”

He mentions as well that “There are difficulties with the positions available for the teachers that speak the languages.  But what is important is that the texbooks provide the ethnical groups with the opportunity to recover their language and culture.  The Lenca people, for example, have lost there spoken language and with the language their origins.  However, there is an intense effort to recover their language and culture.”

And the textbooks for the intercultural bilingual education have reached the schoolrooms. Chortí teacher Feliciano Interiano greets us at the school in the Chortí Village, El Carrizalón. He teaches the Culture and Language in grades one through five and feels proud of having accompanied his students in the presentation of the Honduran National Anthem in Chortí during an event in Santa Rosa de Copán. He tells us that “it is about recovering the culture of the Chortí People - their typical foods, their beliefs, their natural medicine. We all know we belonged to the Chortí people but we were loosing our ties; our children were growing up without knowing anything about our identity. He continues: “The Chorti people feel motivated now because they were taken into account in the preparation of the textbooks for Language and Culture; in the past they have felt disenfranchised.  All has also enriched teaching. In the past we used to work with other methods, most of the time without textbooks.”  Profesor Feliciano is the only teacher at El Carrizalón, literate in the Chortí language; he will need to teach others at the village.

Miriam Leiva highlights that an important aspect of the development of textbooks for Culture and Language is that the curriculum design specialists and linguists were hired to go to the villages to design the texts. The linguists used the same methodology resulting in a common curriculum for all the groups but in the different languages.  She tells us that aside from the social studies and sciences textbooks this year textbooks for Intercultural Bilingual Education have been distributed to 400 the Honduran Program for Community Education (PROHECO) Schools.

The Honduran Program for Community Education (PROHECO) is one of the principal programs supported by the Project.  Edith Marisela Figueroa, General Coordinator comments “that the Honduran Community Education Program (PROHECO) is an alternative program for the most backward and poorest areas of the country.  Even though PROHECO was born in 1998 after Hurricane Mitch in thirteen departments, with funds from the World Bank Project the project, it has been expanded to 18 departments and currently there are 260 municipalities which have the program’s support.  Eighty of them are in some of the poorest regions in the country according to a study made by the Red Solidaria". Today PROHECO has 4,333 teachers and approximately 3,000 schools.”

“PROHECO provides support to places like the Montaña de la Flor where the ethnic group, the Tolupanes, live.  To reach that community textbooks were loaded on boxes that were carried by donkeys”, states Marisela Figureroa.  She explains that “the requirements for the creation of a PROHECO school are a distance of three kilometers from the regular school, that the children have no access to a regular school, or have to cross rivers, creeks or hanging bridges to reach a school.  At present the World Bank funds have ceased notwithstanding the government of Honduras, since 2006, has included the program in its budget and the schools are now being financed with the national budget.”

At the Escuela El Carrizalón our attention is riveted by a small group of children in fifth grade who fascinated read the Science textbooks for second grade.  Perhaps for the first time they are holding in their hands an illustrated textbook which enables them to see with greater clarity what they could only just imagine before.

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