FHI 360 is the recipient of a two-and-a-half-year contract from the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) to strengthen primary and secondary education in El Salvador and help students develop the skills and competencies they need to succeed in school, work and life.
The new program, called Strengthening the National Education System, will work with 346 schools located mainly in rural or semirural communities with low economic productivity, high poverty and limited access to basic social services. The target communities are challenged by high levels of illiteracy, dropout rates, students who are over-aged, and repetition. Learning and teaching in these communities currently tends to be rigid and didactic, with little collaboration and sharing of resources among neighboring schools. In partnership with FOMILENIO II – the government entity responsible for administering MCC awards in El Salvador – and the Ministry of Education, FHI 360 will address these issues by:
- Providing professional development for teachers, principals and ministry officials in subject-specific content, effective pedagogy through the Active Schools model and school management
- Training students, parents, teachers and ministry officials in social-emotional development
- Strengthening school governance and management to improve cooperation and resource sharing among school clusters
- Developing curricular materials, including literacy textbooks, for grades 1 through 11
- Establishing secondary-level technical vocational programs that prepare students for entry into the workforce
- Strengthening the Ministry of Education’s technical capacity in learning assessment, evaluation and data-driven decision-making
The program supports the MCC’s goal of preparing Salvadorans “to better meet the demands of a global economy by improving the quality of education and by better matching the supply of skills to the labor market.” It builds on FHI 360’s past work strengthening primary and lower secondary education in El Salvador as well as on recent workforce development efforts and research on the skills gap in Latin America and the Caribbean.
FHI 360 is also implementing a Millennium Challenge Corporation program to improve lower secondary education in Guatemala.