For as long as I can remember, the prevailing opinion of Haiti’s education system has been that it is on its deathbed, barely hanging on, and doing much harm to children in the process.
Haiti’s education outcomes are among the worst in the Western hemisphere. Almost 80 percent of the country’s primary school teachers are not formally trained, over half of students do not complete primary school, and only 1 percent of students reach university. Every metric — teacher pay, teaching methods, test scores, funding — paints a bleak picture of education in Haiti.
But what if the system is not broken? What if the system is doing exactly what is was designed to do?
Our education system is one of the most enduring vestiges of our colonial past. To know our history is to understand the systems of inequity that are still in place today. Education was enshrined as a human right in Haiti’s earliest constitution, after the successful revolution that resulted in our nation’s independence in 1804. Yet over the last two centuries, education became the battleground for the conscience, identity, and agency of the Haitian people.
Restricting education is one of the most effective ways to control the future of a nation. Disintegrating communities was the best way to reduce the risk of the Haitian people’s audacious collective leadership, which resulted in the first Black republic in the world — against all odds and against the most powerful empire of the early 19th century.
The status quo benefits the economic elite because it allows them to accumulate wealth while continuing to believe in the illusion of meritocracy. We do not ask ourselves, “How is generational poverty possible if equitable systems truly exist?”
Equitable access to tools that could disrupt generational poverty — like quality education, electricity, basic healthcare, clean water, and safe housing — are beyond reach for most of Haiti’s population. Yet the myth is perpetuated of “lazy” and “uneducated” rural populations who do not value what it takes to climb out of poverty.
The education system in Haiti is doing exactly what is was designed to do. It creates the atomization of our people, separating us from a common cause and perpetuating exploitation and distrust among Haitians. It has been stripped of the elements once rooted in citizenship, rigor, and high expectations, including removing civics education from the national curriculum and allowing private schools to proliferate with little oversight from the Ministry of Education (almost 90 percent of schools are private).
TThis is why, in 2014, I co-founded Anseye Pou Ayiti (APA, “Teach For Haiti” in Haitian Creole). We work with communities across the country to create a network of civic leaders and build an equitable education system based on shared history, values, and vision. We recruit local teachers in rural primary schools, equipping them with the resources they need to be exceptional instructional and community leaders. What happens in the classroom is a springboard for what can happen in our communities.
We aim to reclaim community as the source of our power. Our approach to teaching and learning in classrooms, including the integration of Haitian Creole into instructional practice, prioritizes the voices of local communities. We emphasize collaborative group work and student comprehension instead of memorization. Through this, we intentionally relearn the history of our nation.
As we say at APA: history is today.
To relearn our history includes asking why it is currently taught in a way that overlooks Haiti’s influence across the Western Hemisphere. We relearn history by deconstructing the success of our grassroots movements, and identifying figures like Marie Claire Heureuse who often go unrecognized. Instead of focusing on what has failed, we teach history by highlighting what was done right and can be done again. Ultimately, it is local communities that will disrupt and then shift the nation. While classrooms are our unit of execution at APA, the community is our unit of change.
Unlike many education initiatives in my country, we are not going for immediate scale. We instead are focused on building deep relationships in the communities where we work. For us, scale is depth.
To reclaim our communities, we need to determine what it will take to create equity and justice in education. Depth requires healing from the trauma of oppression. Depth takes time and trust. Depth means intentionally planting the seeds, the roots of sustainable change, so an equitable education system is locally owned. Depth allows APA to be an ally organization so that those who have an experience of the injustice we seek to address are the ones leading the fight to eliminate it.
We continue to push ourselves to prioritize depth over scale, though it sometimes feels like a less popular approach. We ask ourselves: How do we prove that we have done right by the community? Who is in the driver’s seat and who has a voice in how children are educated? Is what we do sustainable at a hyper-local level? What is the evidence that we have worked ourselves out of a job — so that no outside NGO is needed for the community to have agency in bringing about their own vision of success? Are we continually focused on scaling impact instead of scaling numbers?
So far, APA is proving what is possible. Across our 66 partner schools and five partner communities, our teacher-leaders’ classrooms achieve grade-level comprehension and student achievement rates of over 85 percent — three times the average of rural communities.
We must recognize the ways in which history is today, including within our education systems. Let’s no longer be complicit and push back on trends that perpetuate inequality. We can and we must dismantle the education systems that were designed for purposes other than providing all children their human right to a quality education.
Nedgine Paul Deroly is the co-founder & CEO of Anseye Pou Ayiti. She has experience in the nonprofit sector with an emphasis on promoting equal educational opportunities for all children.
