educate.

educate. is a grassroots non-profit organisation whose mission is to empower children and young people in Honduras by supporting community-driven initiatives focused on education. We envision a future where there are abundant opportunities for Honduran communities to come together, unimpeded, to learn, lead and grow.

Honduras ranks as one of the poorest and most unequal countries in Latin America. According to Human Rights Watch’s 2023 World Report, nearly 80% of rural Hondurans live in poverty, and almost 40% in extreme poverty. In 2023 only 56% of children between 12-14 and 29% of those between 15-17 were attending school, and the country maintained the highest rate of homicide in the region. According to UNESCO, just 1% of rural youth enter university, and even fewer graduate. This is why we exist.

Based in the rural town of Trinidad, Santa Barbara, we run the first Youth Center and Municipal Library in the region, working in partnership with the local government. Over the past 7 years of work, we have developed a holistic model to support rural youth in becoming leaders in tehri communities who can drive long-lasting change from the ground up. Our model includes:

• Economic scholarships: This financial support provides access to high school and university education for youth for whom these opportunities are out of reach. Scholarships cover costs such as transport to and from school every day. We also provide school materials and uniforms.
• Academic accompaniment: being the first in their families to attend high school (let alone university) is not always easy, and our students often don’t have adults at home to ask questions to if they don’t understand something. We keep track of students’ progress and make sure to find academic support when students are struggling.
• Weekly youth programmes: every Saturday, our scholars participate in activities focused on technology and STEM, art, sport, and communications, gaining new skills, a sense of belonging, and creating impact in their communities.
• Personal development & leadership workshops: Once a month at our Youth Center, all scholars participate in workshops on topics related to personal development (e.g. self-esteem, conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, sexual health education, violence prevention etc.)
• Mental health support: The challenges that come with growing up in a context of poverty and (often, in Honduras) violence, can lead to serious mental health challenges. Through a partnership with an online network of psychologists, our students have access to online counselling and therapy.
• Community projects and support for public schools: projects like school libraries, donations of resources, teacher trainings, and our Youth Center all help to strengthen the public education system from within, driving long-lasting change at the institutional level.

These elements come together in a holistic model that is successfully supporting students in breaking cycles of poverty in their families and communities. In a country deeply affected by political and social crises, we believe in the power of young people to be protagonists of change in their communities.

Antonia McGrath is educate.'s Founder. She founded educate. after spending a year volunteering in Honduras in 2014-15 and acted as the organization's director from our founding in 2017 until January 2024, when we hired our first in-country director. She led the development of educate.'s mission and vision, our holistic approach, and our strong focus on community leadership. Now, Antonia is our Head of Partnerships and Development, primarily focusing on fundraising. She works in a volunteer capacity and is also the co-chair of our board. She is currently a PhD Candidate at the Center for Latin American Research and Documentation at the University of Amsterdam where she studies the role of youth-focused civil society organizations on violence prevention in Honduras.

"Solidifying and evaluating educate.’s evidence-based model for community-driven educational development and youth empowerment" is one of 8 key points in our 3-year (2024-27) strategic plan and therefore a priority for our organization at this time.

As a PhD Candidate, our Founder Antonia McGrath is a researcher by profession and therefore has both a strong understanding of the urgent need for greater research in these fields as well as a strong desire to support such initiatives. 

A holistic education model integrated within the public sector, aimed at empowering rural youth to become leaders in their communities.

The problem that our solution seeks to solve is interdisciplinary, revolving around the exclusion and marginalization of youth due to the effects of poverty. 

In rural Honduras, young people  often find themselves at a crossroads, unable to attend school due to high costs (of materials, uniforms, transportation etc.), or compelled to abandon their education to financially support their families either by working locally in agriculture, or migrating to the cities or north to the United States. These jobs, more often than not, are exploitative and poorly paid. Honduras ranks as one of the poorest and most unequal countries in the region. According to Human Rights Watch’s 2023 World Report, nearly 80% of rural Hondurans live in poverty, and almost 40% in extreme poverty. In 2023 only 56% of children between 12-14 and 29% of those between 15-17 were attending school, and the country maintained the highest rate of homicide in the region. Meanwhile, remittances made up close to 8% of Honduras’ total source of income and 27% of its GDP - the highest rate in Latin America and the Caribbean, due to exponential rates of outward migration. According to UNESCO, just 1% of rural youth enter university, and even fewer graduate.

We recognize that education serves as a cornerstone for sustainable development and that it is crucial for breaking cycles of poverty. Our collaborative efforts with local communities have brought to light several barriers rural youth face in accessing meaningful education, work and entrepreneurship opportunities, including high transport costs for students from remote villages to access secondary and post-secondary educational institutions schools in larger towns, expenses such as school materials and uniforms, high rates of teenage pregnancy (1 in 4 women in Honduras have a child before the age of 18), family disintegration due to outward migration, and migration of young people themselves, in search of opportunities that do not exist in their home communities. 

Our model works to dismantle these barriers and pave the way for inclusive and accessible education that empowers youth to transcend the limitations imposed by poverty, access meaningful employment and entrepreneurship opportunities that foster local development, and thereby act as leaders who drive change in their communities.

Out holistic scholarship programme acts as a model for supporting rural youth, based out of our Youth Center. We work closely with public primary and secondary schools to identify students who 1) are unable to make the jump from 6th to 7th grade (this is when most students drop out, as secondary schools are only located in larger towns, not in smaller villages), and 2) to identify students who are in school but are at high risk of dropping out due to economic and social constraints. We invite these students to apply for high school and university scholarships in a 3-step process: a written application, and interview, and a home visit to meet and speak with their families. We seek students who are passionate about continuing their education, and who are eager to get involved in their communities (participation in all aspects of educate.'s model are a requirement for receiving a scholarship).

Once students are selected, we host an annual scholarship award ceremony where families, teachers and local authorities are invited to attend. Throughout the school year, students participate in weekly activities at our Youth Center through our art, sport, communications and STEM programmes, personal development workshops, academic accompaniment and mental health support services. We also meet three times a year with students' families, and monthly with school directors to track student progress. 

Students who continue to fulfill their scholarship commitments are guaranteed support until they graduate high school, at which point they can apply for tertiary education scholarships.

In 2022 we carried out an extensive impact assessment. We asked community members to fill out questionnaires designed to measure our Theory of Change and our 'Learn, Lead and Grow' cycle of impact. The questionnaires were a mixture of multiple choice, written explanations and numerical agreement statements from 1 (totally disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). The analysis and assessment focused specifically on educate.'s schoalrship programme and library projects. In total we had 89 respondents comprised of our scholars, students at library schools, teachers, family members, and friends from the communities where our work takes place. The published study is available here: https://educatedot.files.wordp...

The results of the above impact study showed that our scholars, their family, friends and teachers recognise the educational benefits of university for our scholars, and that they recognise the development of role models and leadership within the community. Regarding our library projects, the results showed that students, their family members, friends and teachers recognise that students are learning, with increased library usage, reading time and improved reading skills as a result of the library projects,  that libraries were perceived as inclusive and community-owned and led, and that communities felt inspired and empowered by the project.

This study helped us quantify and demonstrate through data the perspectives and experiences of our communities. It also demonstrated the vital importance of continuing to focus on monitoring, evaluation and research in our work.

Over the last two years we have solidified our model in Trinidad, with our Youth Center (which opened in November 2022) now fully operational and well-functioning, a team of youth coordinators fully onboarded, a full-time in-country director, and several committed institutional donors. All of these factors combined put us in a position in which we have not been up until this point: we have much greater stability in our operations, and the space to focus on previously neglected areas, one of which is strengthening the evidence base of our solutions. In fact, this is one of the key areas which we outlined in our 3-year strategic plan (available here: https://educate-ngo.com/wp-con...)

We strive to be a frontrunner in pushing for locally-led development solutions that are integrated within public systems to empower rural youth through education. We know that in order to effectively evaluate the impact of our work as well as our organisational model as a whole, strengthening the evidence base of our solutions is crucial. This will not only allow our work to continue to be driven by genuine needs while becoming increasingly efficient and targeted, but will allow us to assess whether our holistic model functions as we hope and believe it does. Depending on evidence, we can adapt our work, and scale our solution nationally.

What is the impact of educate.'s holistic scholarship programme in Trinidad, Santa Barbara? What aspects are of greatest importance, and what could be done to strengthen the model further?

To what extent / how does educate.'s holistic model of youth empowerment succeed in breaking cycles of poverty for youth in rural communities?

How does educate.'s approach of working to accompany the public sector affect the solution's impact?

What we would hope to end up with from the 12-week LEAP Project sprint would be monitoring and evaluation tools that our team can utilize locally to effectively assess our development model. We envision that this could take the form of impact evaluations in a variety of forms (questionnaires, interview guides etc.), but are very open to hear researchers' ideas! 

We would like to find a way to combine assessing our breadth of impact with our depth of impact, such as through combining an assessment of specific case studies / interviews focused on individual students or schools, with methodologies that allow for a bigger picture view, such as surveys or even a randomized control study.

Having Fellow-produced tools that are targeted towards our goals would allow us to undertake the field-level research locally. Our local director Natalia could work with our group of youth leaders to collect the data in the field with students, schools, teachers, families etc. and conduct the necessary analysis. We would hope to publish all the data digitally on our website so it is fully accessible and transparent to our partners and donors, increasing trust and also demonstrating the validity (hopefully) of our development model.

With this data, if feedback emerges that aspects need modifying, we can use the data as a tool for evidence-based decision making, and refine our model while continuing to assess our progress. We can also pitch our model to regional/departmental and federal government in Honduras as well as to larger institutional donors and partners in order to be able to upscale our work.

Our primary desired outcome of the LEAP Project sprint is to allow us to fill our strategic goal of building a model that is evidence-backed, allowing us to evaluate, demonstrate and assess whether our Theory of Change is actually playing out effectively in practice, see what can be strengthened, and ultimately be able to use this evidence backed-model to upscale our work, as well as contributing to useful data for other education-focused organizations working in rural contexts.