Education: a key concept for development

The past couple of weeks I have been working on my fundraising proposal. How did I want to raise money, but at the same time show people in other countries what a magnificent country Nicaragua was? I decided to make a book about life in Nicaragua. The book would contain pictures, stories of WFP beneficiaries, interviews with other interesting parties, poems and drawings. I am not going to explain the exact content of it yet, but it is going to be an interesting book which hopefully can raise a sufficient amount of money.

To make this book, I had to collect stories and other material. I did many interviews with women and their children while I was in the field. Together with collecting this data, we had to go to the selected communities in which TNT is going to built schools in 2011 to gain extra information and inform the people about the following steps in the process of building this new school.

During these field sessions one thing stroke me; the importance of education. More specifically, the differences in perceived importance between the different generations. I met a women who could not read or write; she always wanted to go to school when she was young, but her parents did not see the need for it. Nowadays, she still cannot read nor write, but she knows the importance of education for her children. They even moved to a different community to live nearby a school and be able to give her children a chance she never had; an education.

The next week I did another interview with a little girl and her grandmother. The grandmother never went to school and neither did her children. But even worse, she did not see the need for going to school for her grand children. When I asked what her dreams were for her granddaughter, she responded by saying that she should work in the field, find a husband and get children.

What I want to show with these two examples is the difference in perceived importance of education between parents of this generation and parents of the generation before them. Nowadays, people see the need for education and how it can help develop a country and its inhabitants. There is a long way to go, but Nicaragua is at least heading in the right direction…