Imagine growing up in a rural area of Honduras. Your only hope of escaping extreme poverty is through education, yet you may not live close enough to a school to attend. Even if you live near one it is likely you can’t attend because, due to extreme poverty, you must spend your days working to help your family survive. In fact, only half the children in rural areas of Honduras can attend school.
If you are one of the lucky children, your school may not have electricity. A third of all the schools in Honduras have no electricity, and those are located in the rural areas. You can probably also forget about quality teaching, even if the teacher is trained and dedicated, because 20% of the schools in Honduras have only one teacher for six grades and 50 pupils!
These are discouraging facts that were recently published by the National Statistical Institute, but amidst the disheartening statistics there was a positive message – that the difficulties have been mitigated for tens of thousands of rural children by the existence of radio education – the school Sor Marta, our Global Pearls partner, had the vision and determination to start.