The United States Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has just returned from a visit to Haiti after announcing a $15 million dollar grant towards strengthening Haiti’s education system.
During his stay, Duncan met with Haiti’s President Michel Martelly and the Minister of Education Vanneur Pierre. Together, they toured various schools in Haiti.
Duncan said, “the challenges are obviously very real…huge challenges of poverty, nothing is easy there–but what I was most struck by, was how passionately committed children were to getting an education and how hard adults were working to give them the education they need to build a better life for themselves.”
Additionally, Duncan calls for greater transparency in the education system. He says, “One of the many needs here are clear data systems, having transparency, knowing basic things, like how many children we have, how many schools there are, how many teachers we have.”
In addition to the USAID grant, the U.S. will also provide technical assistance to Haiti’s Education Ministry. Haiti plans to send a team of education officials to D.C. as part of bilateral cooperation. These discussions are to include teacher training and are all in efforts of strengthening Haiti’s Ministry of Education.
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