Pencils Of Promise Incorporated

Our second core program is teacher support. We invest in teacher development through in-service and workshop training sessions. Twice each month, our staff visit government teachers in partner communities to provide guidance in lesson planning, methodology training, and building stronger connections with students. Teachers also attend workshops for group training and peer network building. Our approach emphasizes interactive teaching methods that increase student engagement, because engaged students perform at higher levels. In the short term, our teacher support programs focus on helping teachers create and use effective lesson plans, encouraging interactive methodologies to strengthen rapport with students, supporting peer networks through workshops, and providing classrooms with teaching and learning materials. Over the long term, our goal is to raise primary student literacy scores across all of our regions. The main beneficiaries of our teacher support program are the teachers and students in our schools and communities. By the end of 2024, we had supported 5,012 teachers across laos, guatemala, and ghana.

Our third core program is the wash program, which focuses on water, sanitation, and hygiene. Wash is an internationally recognized initiative adopted by unicef in 2005 to address hygiene needs in the developing world. We began implementing wash practices in laos in 2010 and have since expanded to guatemala and ghana. Through this program, we build sanitation facilities for students and teacherssuch as handwashing stations and bathroomsalongside new classroom construction. Our staff also visit classrooms twice per month during the school year to teach lessons on water, sanitation, and hygiene. The primary goals of the wash program are to ensure access to safe toilets, potable water, and reliable handwashing stations in schools lacking this infrastructure, while also increasing proper hygienic and sanitary behavior among primary students. By the end of 2024, we had supported1,277 schools with wash programming.