Fundación Gloria de Kriete-Aprendamos Juntos

Gloria de Kriete Foundation (FGK) is a private NGO that was founded in 2004. Its main objective is the construction of a more solid society, committed to the integral development of Salvadorans providing them tools to improve their life conditions. 

During these 18 years, the Gloria Kriete Foundation has impacted more than 3,200,000 Salvadorans in health, education, employment training, community development, entrepreneurship, technology, innovation, and the environment.

FGK is directing its strategic investment in three directly managed programs, mainly focused on innovation, local development, and education, and works as a second-floor NGO, providing to other six supported programs that contribute to our 4 action pillars:

Education

Health

Collaboration

Employability and Job placement

MISSION

To be a family Foundation, sustainable through many generations, that dreams and works towards the creation of a more solidary society, committed to the holistic development of the less fortunate.

VISSION

To be a reference Foundation that promotes the spirit of service and solidarity, leading by example, developing its projects, and supporting organizations committed to the welfare and improvement of the Salvadoran family.

PURPOSE

At the Foundation we believe that all human beings deserve the tools to fight with equal opportunities and thus change their living conditions and those of their environment.

CORE VALUES

Gratitude

Solidarity

Integrity

Commitment

Cooperation

Sustainability

Abigail Cisneros has worked for the Gloria de Kriete Foundation (FGK) since 2008.  She is currently the Educational Director of FGK. Her role includes:

1. Supervising the general operations of the 6 training centers operated by one of our educational programs called Oportunidades.

Her role as Operational director of oportunidades program encompasses a wide range of responsibilities, including but not limited to operational planning,  Phase 1 beneficiaries' management, supervision, monitoring, and evaluation of Phase 1 staff. It also involves the following specific roles:

• Define, update, and review the operational plan and annual budget.
• Propose operational goals for Phase 1 related to the compliance of the program's general goals.
• Plan strategies to promote improvements of managing resources.
• Supervise the planning and implementation of the established study program.
• Supervise the planning and execution of academic and extracurricular activities.
• Manage the necessary staff to implement the program.

2. Serves as a liaison for all the educational initiatives promoted by FGK including strategic alliances with other NGOs both local and abroad that will allow our programs to always keep on growing.

3. Serves as a strategic linkage for the programs supported by FGK related to the educational action pillar: ONUVA and Aprendamos Juntos.

To effectively utilize Abigail Cisneros' role as the current Educational Director as a Team Lead for the LEAP Project several aspects can be taken into account:

1. Leverage Abigail's Expertise: Abigail's strengths, experiences, and knowledge as the Educational Director, particularly in serving as a liaison for all educational programs, will serve as invaluable in guiding the rest of the team through the LEAP Project. She is highly respected as a leader and knows the programs she serves to in detail.
2. Clear Communication Channels: Abigail has managed to establish clear communication channels between team members. Regular meetings, updates, and feedback sessions can ensure that everyone is aligned with project goals and expectations.
3. Defined Roles and Responsibilities: Clearly defining the roles and responsibilities of both Abigail as the Team Lead and other team members within the LEAP Project will be core. This clarity helps in avoiding confusion and ensures that each member knows their contribution towards project success. This is one of Abigail´s capabilities taking into account the work she manages.
4. Utilize Prioritization Skills: Given that Abigail might have other organizational priorities as the Educational Director, she can for the process delegate certain responsibilities and therefore use her prioritization skills effectively. She has a sub-director and an academic coordinator who can help with other relevant tasks while assuming the extra time demanded by the LEAP Program. This process involves aligning the LEAP Project's objectives with the overarching goals of the organization and ensuring that resources are allocated accordingly.
5. Regular Monitoring and Feedback: Implementing a system for regular monitoring of progress and providing constructive feedback to both Abigail and team members. This ensures that any issues or challenges are addressed promptly, and adjustments can be made to improve performance.
6. She is an english speaking professional (English teacher as a base of her professional career). She will have no problem addressing complex analysis questions and serving as a POC for the LEAP team.

By implementing these strategies or using the already built-in abilities, Abigail Cisneros can effectively serve as a Team Lead for the LEAP Project while ensuring that supporting team members are well-equipped to contribute, even amidst other priorities within the organization.

Let's Learn Together offers early childhood education and stimulation for children, empowering caregivers with proper educational tools in rural communities.

Our challenge is to achieve the biopsychosocial development of boys and girls, contributing to their growth from home-based learning until the time they continue in school centers, preventing school dropout, reducing the school repetition rate, and sharing, through our institutional values, the importance of strengthening bonds among family members.

According to the case study on childcare for infant development in El Salvador conducted by UNICEF: 

"A child's brain doesn't simply come into existence; it is built. Early experiences powerfully shape brain development and affect a child's learning, behavior, and health for life. An important ingredient in these experiences is loving and sensitive care, as it promotes good health, nutrition, protection from violence, and adults' ability to respond to promote infant development (including play, communication, and early learning opportunities)".

Unfortunately, according to UNICEF data, millions of children worldwide lack the conditions that promote their optimal development. For example, it is estimated that 43 percent of children under 5 years old are at risk of poor development due to poverty and growth delays. In countries with available data (mostly low- and middle-income countries), nearly 80 percent of children aged 2 to 4 years are often victims of violent discipline, and around 15.5 million children aged 3 and 4 years have no adult providing them with care through cognitive or socioemotional interactions (such as storytelling, singing, naming, reading, counting or drawing, and playing).

A series of new laws have been introduced since 2009 in support of Salvadoran children. Since then according to the Ministry of Health by 2014 El Salvador had approximately 3,300 health promoters located in the country's 262 municipalities, operating mainly in rural areas and marginalized urban zones. Each promoter served between 200 and 300 families with six to 10 home visits per day, prioritizing populations at higher risk: pregnant and postpartum women, newborns, children under 5 years old, elderly individuals, and people with disabilities.

There is a lot of work to be done to extend the coverage of programs such as ours, which help the local government as promoters of initial education.

More importantly, the progress report of early childhood policies presented by UNICEF in 2021 indicates that El Salvador lacks a unified national system to record data and indicators on the quality of services provided and the outcomes of early childhood interventions.

 Monitoring of initiatives and services for young children is conducted independently through responsible public institutions in the areas of health, education, and protection. While institutions responsible for these services publish administrative, financial, and programmatic information on most interventions, there are currently no quality standards for early childhood services in areas such as health, preschool education, childcare centers, family support, and child protection. This makes it difficult to obtain statistics on equipment, processes, equipment and infrastructure conditions, and the measurement of children's learning and the real impact of programs such as Let´s learn together.

It is a permanent FGK program, operated by AGAPE, which intervenes in rural communities in Sonsonate and Ahuachapan (Providing assistance to 4 municipalities; Sonsonate, Acajutla, Izalco and San Francisco Ménendez), it is aimed at early childhood in children under 6 years of age, who are offered Initial Education through early stimulation to awaken the areas comprehensive development in language, fine psychomotor skills, gross psychomotor skills, socio-affective skills and sensory perception.

Through Initial Education and Early Stimulation provided to children under 6 years of age in the rural communities of Sonsonate and Ahuachapán, new generations of boys and girls with exceptional abilities are being formed that will contribute to changing the future of their families.

The main lines of work are:

1. Early childhood education through early stimulation for children under 6 years old.
2. Education and awareness for parents through workshops and educational talks.
3. Addressing prevalent childhood diseases (Work on preventing recurrent diseases in beneficiaries).
4. Care for pregnant women through stimulation of the baby during gestation.

Annually, an average of 750 children are benefit directly. Indirectly, 2063 family members are benefit.

It is important to highlight that the workday is carried out in two modalities:

• Children aged 0-2 years: Facilitators conduct home visits directly to the beneficiaries' homes.
• Children aged 3 and older: They are attended to in person at our Early Education Center, known as "CEDIN."

The operational team consists of 12 collaborators called Early Education Facilitators (all women), who come from and live in the communities being socially impacted. The use of community members within the team facilitates communication and relationships with the families served, especially because childcare requires a pre-established bond of trust. The 12 collaborators work under the direction of a licensed educator who supervises the team's work.

So far the program has never carry a research or study that have helped demostrate our impact in 24 years of operation.

Does not apply

The let´s learn together program, from its creation in the year 2000 until 2023, has achieved the following:

1. Conducted over 34,000 assessments of children under 6 years old.
2. Carried out 17.8 thousand Playful Days and home visits.
3. Delivered 1,500 educational sessions.
4. Provided 3,400 preventive health services.

The program's trajectory has been extensive and wide-reaching, focusing on the most vulnerable sectors of the country. Under the umbrella of the Gloria de Kriete Foundation, which has also strengthened over the years, we aim for each supported program to have solid foundations to enhance its growth.

The foundation has recently undergone various processes that allowed it to formulate its theory of change and align data collection methods, as well as analysis, to foster a culture of evidence that serves for informed decision-making.

Therefore, we believe that this is the opportune moment to facilitate an experience like the one Lead Challenge offers for one of our supported programs, such as Let´s learn together.

Currently, measuring the impact of the program's trajectory has been directly related to the number of services provided, assessments conducted, and educational sessions delivered to direct or indirect beneficiaries. However, we are aware that the program's reach has been much greater in the lives of beneficiaries.

There are causal relationships that we have seen flourish as a result of our presence in the territory, which would be important to explore when seeking support in developing a theory of change and conducting a more detailed impact study.

1.How can we measure and evaluate the program efficiently?

2.How effective are home visits and playful days in improving early childhood development outcomes?

3.How does access to quality early childhood education contribute to breaking the cycle of poverty in underserved areas?

4.How can technology be leveraged to enhance the delivery and effectiveness of early childhood education and health services?

5.How can we systematize the annual experience of the program,in order for it to be scale up and more attractive for international cooperation?

6.How can we evaluate the responsibilities and roles of program members to reach even better results?

The desire outputs of the 12-week Leap Project sprint could be:

1.Design of a proper theory of change phramework that involve several members of the team. 

1.1 Development of communication materials to share findings and successes with stakeholders and the wider community.

2.A pre-post or multi-measure research to assess the effectiveness of the programs. Relevant information could be collected from participants both before and after the intervention has been administered (Since the program has many years of operation).

2.1Identification of key research questions and methodologies to assess the effectiveness of interventions.

2.2 Creation of a comprehensive data collection and analysis plan to measure learning outcomes and program impact.

2.3 Implementation of evidence-based strategies and interventions to address identified learning gaps and challenges.v

2.4 Integration of evidence-based practices into program design and implementation to ensure sustained impact on children’s learning outcomes.

3.Process evaluation could help us evaluate key process, responsibilities and roles of program members to reach even better results. 

3.1Having a proven and systematic framework that allows us to monitor and evaluate the interventions of the mentors with the beneficiary children and families, and improve internal processes for the benefit of program participants.

3.2 Additionally, having a clear organizational chart of program members with their functions and responsibilities, and having satisfaction surveys.

3.3Training of staff and stakeholders on evidence-based practices and methodologies.

3.4 Documentation of best practices and lessons learned throughout the process.

By actively implementing suggestions and strategies that result from the whole experience, we aim to effectively translate the desired outputs of the LEAP Challenge application into tangible actions that drive positive change and improve outcomes for the children and families we serve. Specifically we plan to do so by:

1. Hold regular meetings and workshops to brainstorm ideas, identify goals and outcomes, and map out the pathways to achieving desired impacts drafted in the theory of change.

2. Engage the core team members in drawing the follow-up steps that enable a transformation of annual goal setting.

3. Document the theory of change framework in a clear and concise format, ensuring that it reflects the collective vision and goals of the organization and helps guide the setting of annual KIPs and goals.

4. Analyze the data and information collected to identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement, and use these insights to inform programmatic decisions and adjustments.

5. Establish a follow-up committee that includes the role of the Director of education that will help navigate the program through areas of improvement.

6. Develop a systematic framework for monitoring and evaluating program interventions, including mentorship activities and internal processes.

7. Implement regular check-ins and performance reviews to assess progress and ensure alignment with program objectives.

8. Provide training and professional development opportunities to staff and stakeholders to enhance their skills and knowledge in evidence-based practices.

9. Document best practices and lessons learned throughout the evaluation process, and use this information to inform future program planning and implementation.

10. Communicate effectively the results of impact analysis and study with the most relevant stakeholders related to the program.

The main objective of Let´s Learn together is to enhance the bio-psychosocial development of boys and girls from pregnancy to 6 years old who live in rural communities in the departments of Sonsonate and Ahuachapán through early childhood education and timely stimulation.

The desired long-term outcomes for both our organization and solution include:

• Professionalization of necessary aspects to make the program more appealing to future donors or partners.
• Being able to expand the program's reach based on solid foundations of the impact we have generated so far by taking on key important areas that we are aware of with solid evidence we are successful at. 
• An evidence-based culture will enable the decision-making process to be open to new innovative projects that could result in an enhanced impact on the life of our beneficiaries.
• Own and manage a systematic framework that allows us to monitor and evaluate the interventions of our educational facilitators with the beneficiary children and families, and improve internal processes for the benefit of program participants.