Leadership Initiative

A growing body of research suggests that leadership and extracurricular opportunities in schools contribute to greater student achievement in the classroom.

The pattern is especially strong in urban slums, where young people face the daily pressures of low-wage employment, gang violence, and drugs. Honduras has the lowest secondary school enrollment rate in the Western Hemisphere — just 25% — in part because its students must wrestle with these pressures. We believe that, by creating opportunities for young people in poor schools to succeed in non-academic contexts, we can stimulate change within school environments.

In 2009, we began our Leadership Initiative. For young people in Colonia Villanueva and other urban slums, the lack of opportunities within schools reflects the lack of productive opportunities outside of school. By empowering young people beyond the traditional classroom, we hope to reduce dropout rates and grade repetition and improve academic achievement.

We are working with partners to develop a leadership component to complement Honduras’s existing primary school curriculum. We plan to test this curriculum in our partner schools in 2010, and to carefully document our findings to guide the future work of PVN and our partners.