Provide Meals for Rural High School in Ecuador
Students of Yachana Technical High School manage an organic farm, providing 40% of the school's food, but additional food and supplies have to be brought in. The cost of bringing in food to feed the entire school daily is a major expense for Yachana Foundation. You can help provide support to indigenous and mestizo students of rural communities in Ecuador's Amazon region by providing meals to all the students and faculty of the school at a very affordable cost. Your contribution of meals will help support programs that promote conservation of the Amazon's biodiversity through the support of the school's activities such as the teaching of sustainable use of natural resources, fostering of professional skills to improve employability, and mentoring management of student-run ecological enterprises.
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The Need
In the Amazon region of Ecuador, poverty, environmental degradation and poor quality of public education are all inextricably linked. Thirty percent of elementary school children in the Amazon region do not finish the 6th grade. Only 15% finish secondary schooling. Students drop out because they feel the current public education available in their remote communities is impractical and irrelevant to their everyday lives. To address these issues, in October 2005, the Yachana Foundation opened the Yachana Technical High School to benefit high school-age indigenous and mestizo students who live in remote rural communities in Ecuador's Amazon region. Meaningful education is the key to reversing generations of poverty, raising environmental awareness and ensuring the sustainable use of the region's natural resources.
About Yachana Foundation
Partner since November, 2008
Since 1991, the Yachana Foundation, formally FUNEDESIN, and its projects have invested approximately 5.2 million dollars in the Ecuadorian Amazon. This investment of time and resources has underwritten many triumphs. One of its projects the Yachana Technical High School, is a non-traditional, regional boarding school with 80% indigenous students from five Amazonian provinces within Ecuador, representing four ethnic groups. Instruction is a practical, hands-on approach to learning, offering applicable education where few income-generation options exist. The Yachana Technical High School trains 81 indigenous and mestizo students in rural communities of Ecuador’s Amazon region and employs 16 staff members. The school is designed to be as close to self-sustaining as possible. The Yachana Foundation provides an extensive “campus” of 4,300 acres of land and infrastructure where the students study ecotourism, sustainable agriculture, forest and wildlife management and environmentally sustainable micro-enterprises. Some additional projects include launching Yachana Lodge - a world renowned geo-tourism location - in 1995, establishing Mondaña Medical Clinic in 1997 which offers the only full-time healthcare to over 8,000 Quichua indigenous people, and constructing 21 schools in impoverished communities throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon.
