A Country's Hope: The Haiti Scholarship Program

The Haiti Scholarship Program is a USAID-funded effort managed by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and implemented by local Haitian non-profit organization Le Fonds de Parrainage National (FPN) to provide scholarship support to more than 15,000 students in the five Haitian cities of Petit-Goâve, Port-au-Prince, Saint-Marc, Gonaïves, and Cap-Haïtien—sites of the worst political violence and civil unrest in 2003 and 2004. It is a unique program of educational support, based on FPN’s own scholarship model which targets the country’s private schools as the foci for program interventions. The program supports public and private schools to retain needy children in school and create the conditions for their academic success through supplemental tutoring and school improvement projects.

As explained in this report, thousands of Haitian children have benefited from the opportunity to attend school because of USAID’s Haiti Scholarship Program. The work of FPN staff, especially the team of supervisors who work directly with the participating schools, has been instrumental to this success. Also important has been AIR’s effort to build the capacity of FPN to support such large numbers of students and to increase its ability to encourage businesses and community members to invest in education. Together, these advancements contribute to empowering the Haitian community to take responsibility for the education of its children. Faced with many difficult challenges to their health and well-being, education is one tool that Haiti’s children have which holds the possibility of providing a brighter, healthier, and more productive future.