Entrepreneurial Technical High School in Diriomo, Nicaragua

Opportunity International is launching a Technical High School to teach youth entrepreneurship skills in the agriculture and tourism industries as part of its community development initiative in Nicaragua.

Opportunity recently broke ground on its Entrepreneurial Technical High School in Diriomo, Nicaragua. The school will provide rural students with the education and training they need to rise out of poverty. It will also provide the community with educated and skilled workers to catalyze regional economic growth.

The first class of 50 students will matriculate in February and there are currently 30 students registered. Students will receive education in a high school academic curriculum, plus technical training in tourism and agriculture, all while learning to speak English. To date, two classrooms, the administrative office, a meeting room and restrooms have been completed. The director of the school as well as three teachers have been hired.

If you’d like to get involved and lend your crucial support to rural education and community development in Nicaragua, please visit opportunity.org/give and start an online fundraiser for Nicaragua.

This morning, President Obama commemorated World AIDS Day with an AIDS panel discussion at George Washington University, which was streamed live at 9:00 EST by the ONE Campaign on YouTube. The panel featured President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Tanzanian President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete, U2′s Bono and more.

World AIDS Day 2011 Poster (www.worldaidscampaign.org)

Over the last month, other world leaders have been speaking out in honor of World AIDS Day. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued a statement: “Heading into the fourth decade of AIDS, we are finally in a position to end the epidemic. […] Synergies between prevention and treatment are speeding up progress. But to end AIDS, we need to deliver even greater results. This year in June, the United Nations General Assembly’s High-Level Meeting on AIDS adopted bold targets for 2015: reduce the sexual transmission of HIV by half, eliminate new infections in children, provide treatment for 15 million people living with HIV, end stigma and discrimination, and close the AIDS funding gap. With strong political will, reasonable financial resources and a firm human rights-based approach, we can achieve all of these targets.”

Secretary Clinton spoke to the National Institute of Health in November about the U.S.’s work to bring about creating an AIDS-free generation, eliminating mother-to-child transmission, preventing infection among adults, and treatment for those already afflicted. “Although the past 30 years have been a remarkable journey, we still have a long, hard road ahead of us. But today, thanks both to new knowledge and to new ways of applying it, we have the chance to give countless lives and futures to millions of people who are alive today, but equally, if not profoundly more importantly, to an entire generation yet to be born.”

At Opportunity International, education through financial, health and life-skills training is an integral part of our services to our clients. In Sub-Saharan Africa, as part of health training modules offered in our banks in Malawi, Mozambique and Rwanda, clients have access to education that promotes better understanding and prevention of HIV/AIDS. We’re committed to life-skills training and education like this in order to improve all aspects of our clients’ lives.

After more than three decades, the global fight against AIDS has come so far, and yet there is still much to do. As Secretary Clinton said, “Our efforts have helped set the stage for an historic opportunity, one that the world has today: to change the course of this pandemic and usher in an AIDS-free generation.”

This was just the first stop on Frida’s U.S. visit, which will take her all around the country to meet our domestic staff and contributors at private meetings and big events, where she’ll share about her work and answer supporters’ questions about life and microfinance in Uganda. Meet Frida Mungoma, who’s speaking tonight at a Young Ambassadors for Opportunity (YAO) event in San Francisco, and next Wednesday at the YAO event A Toast to Tanzania in New York. If you get the chance, I encourage you to get to an event near you to meet Frida.

Frida on the impact and importance of Opportunity Uganda’s education finance program:

What’s the most rewarding aspect of your job?

My greatest challenge:

Banking on Education panel (from left): Char Caldwell, Geoffrey Thige, Liesel Pritzker, and Steve Nelson.

While Ghana, Malawi and Uganda do offer government-funded public schools, financial constraints force classrooms designed for 40 students to swell to accommodate nearly 120. With a stark student-teacher ratio, there’s no opportunity for students to receive personalized education, and thus, individual learning and comprehension suffers.

Not only are public facilities limited in populous areas, but many remote villages and towns are often deprived entirely of any public education. Without government-run programs, many towns have turned to private education run by entrepreneurs. Though by definition ‘private,’ these schools don’t match the lush American view of private schools, and are often as limited in resources as the public schools.

Because these private facilities do not fall within the parameters set by USAID, these programs often go without outside aid and support–even though they are sometimes the only school within a community. That’s where Opportunity International steps in. Opportunity works with these schools to develop loans and offer business training to help schools maximize efficiency, turn a profit, and then invest that knowledge and capital back into the schools to improve the quality of education.

In addition to providing support for schools, Opportunity also offers loans to offset tuition costs for families. Families making less than $2 a day struggle to afford a $51 per year annual tuition, and sometimes are forced to enroll students intermittently for a semester at a time. Interruptions in schooling compromise a student’s learning and potential for success, so Opportunity offers microloans to help parents cover tuition and provide continuous education for their children.

Opportunity has a presence in nearly 500 schools effectively touching over 120,000 students. Char Caldwell, VP of resource development, closed the session by saying, “We truly believe that every child deserves an education.” And through microfinance, Opportunity is making that mission a reality.

This post was written by Allison Altdoerffer. Allison is a public relations professional and a member of the YAO – San Francisco chapter.

Highlights from Pastor Ortberg’s Speech

John Ortberg, Pastor of the Menlo Park Presbyterian Church

I’d like to take a few moments to think with you why it’s worth all the labor, all the sacrifice to relieve suffering and battle poverty, when you’re only one person. What it’s really about is the worth of a single human being. It’s because human beings are all around us.

In the ancient world, there was the concept that every person, whether they are part of your tribe or nation, are worthy of your compassion. That’s an important concept.

This idea that human beings have a dignity or a worth or a value isn’t always something that has been present on this planet. But a man named Jesus taught about this. What is the worth of a single human being? Jesus would teach that if your ox falls into the well, will you not fish it out?

The hairs of your head are numbered.

We may begin to think that the goal of our life is to maintain a balanced, manageable life. After I first visited Ethiopia, I returned home to my baby daughter and thought, ‘Those children in Ethiopia do not hope that I live a balanced and manageable life.’

Sometimes people motivated by God’s love do things for no strategic reason at all.

Rousing the crowd from the mainstage with stories and teachings about compassion for those in poverty

Jesus is saying that every person who is hurt, abused, ravaged by disease, without shelter, without food–every one is worth more than you can possibly imagine. Every one of them carries the image of God.

Here’s the deal. It’s called Opportunity International. Here’s the opportunity: you and I get to be, in some strange way–when we actually give, actually serve–we get to be like the hands and feet of God.

Martin Luther King used to talk about the idea of “somebodyness.” And it’s not about how much money or talent someone has, it’s just because everyone is somebody. We all get to be the hands and feet of God to love somebody. That’s the greatest opportunity any human being has ever had.

A bit about Pastor Ortberg

John Ortberg is pastor at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, a multi-campus church in California with more than 4,000 members. His teaching brings Scripture alive and invariably includes practical applications and warm humor. John is the best-selling author of several books, including When the Game Is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box; If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of the Boat; The Life You’ve Always Wanted; Everybody’s Normal Till You Get to Know Them; Faith and Doubt; Love Beyond Reason; Know Doubt: The Importance of Embracing Uncertainty in Your Faith; Look Through God-Colored Glasses; and most recently, The Me I Want to Be: Becoming God’s Best Version of You. He has written for Christianity Today and is a frequent contributor to Leadership Journal.

Watch it now:

Want to learn more about Opportunity’s work to improve underserved neighborhood schools in Africa and bring education to more children? Check out the breakout session “Banking on Education” at this year’s fall conference in San Francisco, Oct. 14-Oct. 15. If you can’t be there in person, watch the live video stream of main stage and select breakout sessions. Go to opportunity.org/conference to learn more.

Don’t miss your chance to meet expert international staff member Geoffrey at Opportunity’s conference. He’ll be speaking at several sessions, including two of our breakout sessions, “Fighting Poverty with Technology” and “Banking on Education.” For more on the conference and to register, go to opportunity.org/conference.

Geoffrey Thige invites you to the fall 2011 conference:

Opportunity is about building from the base of the economic pyramid. And Caterpillar is about building the infrastructure for the communities and nations where we work that really become the highways for commerce and for business development in a country. So that makes for a really great partnership.
-Dennis Ripley, senior vice president, Opportunity International

Watch this video about Opportunity’s work to end global poverty with the support of the Caterpillar Foundation:

Want to learn more about our partnership with the Caterpillar Foundation? Go to caterpillar.com/foundation »

Session panelists (from left to right): Mary Ellen Iskenderian, Manasseh Phiri, Seema Aziz, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, Elaine Edgcomb, and Kebede Ayele.

In this afternoon panel, “Going Small for Big Results: Microfranchise and Entrepreneurial Growth,” participants discuss the impact of “microfranchise and microenterprise” business strategies to help create jobs and assist business owners in low-income, marginalized communities around the world where access to employment is the scarcest. Beyond employment, these small businesses can also deliver critical goods and services to more marginalized and underserved people, especially women. This panel focuses on communities where entrepreneurship is a key source of jobs, and other sources may not be available, and discuss those enterprise-development strategies.

Moderator:
Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President and CEO, Women’s World Banking

Participants:
Manasseh Phiri, Executive Director, Society for Family Health
Seema Aziz, Partner and Executive Director, Sefam; Chairperson, CARE Foundation
Morgan R. Tsvangirai, Prime Minister of the Republic of Zimbabwe
Elaine L. Edgcomb, Director, FIELD, The Aspen Institute
Kebede Ayele, Country Director, Ethiopia, iDE

As the session launched, each participant introduced their organizations or backgrounds, and how these relate to microenterprise.

Kebede Ayele explained that iDE was an international NGO headquartered in the U.S. which operates in Asia, Latin America and Ethiopia, working with local farmers to transform from subsistence to small-scale commercial farming. He emphasized that the goal is to make their work scalable, allowing them access to affordable irrigation technologies, increasing their productivity, and then designing irrigation technologies via a private supply chain, building local private micro-enterprises. “Though we are an NGO,” Kebede says, “we are also a market-based organization, working to reach scale. Microfinance plays a key role, enabling farmers to borrow money and then pay it back. Within three to five years, we have a goal of reaching 50,000 households.”

Manasseh Phiri represented the Society for Family Health, which emphasizes the “social marketing” of health issues and microfranchising through clinics and through community health workers, offering family planning services, and counseling and testing for HIV and for TB. They train community health workers in social marketing, providing them with small health items such as water purification tools that they can sell for a small price, then they earn a little money, save it, buy more items to sell, and create a micro-enterprise.

Elaine Edgcomb operates FIELD at The Aspen Institute, which provides microfinance, training and technical assistance through organizations and small companies in the U.S, engaging in specific sectors to produce enterprises that produce jobs. Asked by Manasseh about their employment of “developing world techniques,” Elaine says, “Actually, microenterprise in the U.S. takes lessons from international microfinance… We have lots of grassroots organizations that employ peer-lending, peer-learning, individual lending, and technical support. We’re eager to trade both ways and learn from you as well.”

Seema Aziz has grown her Pakistan-based businesses in the last 26 years, utilizing local micro-entrepreneurs and creating jobs in their community. They were creating high-quality clothing with machines but began outsourcing hand-embellishing of garments to local entrepreneurs, providing all the materials they need. When the local vendors began picking up more and more materials, Seema realized that they had grown and hired more employees to do this work. In this way, her businesses were providing more jobs within the local community. They now have about 200 master vendors/workers who each employ between 20 and 70 people. “This is very scalable in other countries,” Seema says. The vendors have minimal risk and need little access to capital, offering them access to opportunities they would not otherwise have. “We’re training women to go into flood areas now,” Seema says, “creating a bigger and more sustainable solution.” She says, “We created our model out of a desire to use local vendors and entrepreneurs, and now thousands of people are growing and creating businesses on their own.” But most of all, she says that education and training are really critical. “The difference between empowerment and helplessness is education.” The difference between empowerment and helplessness is education. -Entrepreneur Seema Aziz

Morgan Tsvangirai, the prime minister of Zimbabwe, asked how does a government create jobs. “I think a government facilitates conditions to create jobs and to develop people’s skills to do so.” Zimbabwe has a high percentage of people in the informal sector. We’re aiming to have a generation of educated, young Africans who have job opportunities. In Africa, corporate investment is not the solution, it’s small enterprises that touch big enterprises, increasing employment of young people and encouraging small entrepreneurs. But he asks, “How can you loan without collateral?” Seema replied that in the microfinance model, especially that employing Trust Groups, there is no collateral because the group co-guarantees each others’ loans.

Moderator Mary Ellen Iskenderian asks, “How do you make training sustainable?” Kebede says that iDE’s own staff trains farmers and then they recruit from their own farmers as training agents.

For Opportunity International, this panel reinforces the impact that small-scale entrepreneurs in the U.S. and around the globe can have on their local communities. Not only is small, grass-roots entrepreneurship sustainable but it is a local source of jobs. With training, education and opportunities, local and previously underserved people, especially women, can create big and sustainable changes in their lives, providing for their families with businesses that can be a sustainable source of jobs for the next generation.

Augustine Adjei Bonnah teaches English to grade 4 students. Bonnah, who has been working at the school for five years, is the school's creative arts teacher for all grade levels.

Supreme David Educational Complex is situated in Buoho, outside of Kumasi, in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. Several years ago, Buoho resident David Asenso noticed that parents in his community had to travel long distances in order to take their children to school because the area lacked a neighborhood school. Due to the time and cost of travel, most parents could not send their children to school at all, which meant that not only were the local children not receiving an education but they were sometimes left unattended during the day. So in 2006, Asenso decided to start a school in his house so that these children could study. When the school opened it had six students–four girls and two boys–who were all in nursery. This year, three of those six original students will be entering primary school
grade 5.

Initially, Asenso offered free tuition to his students as well. They only had to pay canteen fees of 20 pesewas daily, which sometimes made it difficult for David to pay his teachers but it encouraged parents to send their children there. At one point, to save costs, David  had to work two positions in his school–as the proprietor and as a teacher! He advertised by going door-to-door and taught children poems to recite when they went home, which made the parents proud. As his enrollment increased, he did not have enough classrooms and the wooden classrooms he did have were not appealing to the parents, so many of them took their children out of the school because of the environment. Until IDP Rising Schools (IDPRS) Program came in to support him with a loan to refurbish his school’s infrastructure. Before joining with the IDPRS Program, the school offered grade levels creche through primary 2. Today, it enrolls 130 pupils and has added primary grade 5 this September for the opening of the new academic year.

Post-renovation, the school now features cement block walls and other amenities.

Asenso, part of Tranche 1 Ashanti Region schools, received 16 weeks of training from November 2009 to March 2010. The school’s caterer was trained in June 2010 to improve the nutritional value of the food served to students, and maintain hygiene and sanitary standards. The lead teacher was trained in January 2011 during a one-week immersion training session, and has returned to the school to impart this knowledge to the other teachers at the school. The school has also received school supplies, such as books and games, from IDPRS. David Asenso has taken three loans from IDPRS, which are running concurrently. He used his loans to convert his wooden classrooms into block cement. He is very good at making loan repayments and is thinking of using his next loan to buy a bus for his school.

David says he really appreciates the work of IDPRS and is grateful to the IDPRS program for coming to his aid. He says he can now manage his school very well and that the overall state of the school has improved. David hopes to take his school to a higher level with the help of IDPRS.

For more on the IDP Rising Schools Program, visit idpfoundation.org. For further reading on the Opportunity Blog about education finance initiatives, click here.