Greetings from the Philippines!

We’ve been here for the past two weeks, engaging the families from our adopted school, the Baruyan Elementary School, in a needs-assessment dialogue.

We quickly found out that some of the families were at the brink of not being able to send their high-schoolers back to school due to the rising cost of transportation. All high-school students residing in Baruyan need to travel about 2 miles to get to the nearest high-school.

After a series of conversations with parents, we developed a pilot solution :

We will contract with four (4)tricycle owners/drivers residing in the community, familiar with the kids and their locations. Each tricycle can transport five (5) students.
We identified twenty (20) students, 7th-11th graders, based on need, allowing participation by up to two students per family.
Today we met with the parents, the students and the tricycle drivers to discuss our pilot and assign respective drivers with specific students. The photo here is from this meeting.
UNLAD will fund the cost of the transportation for the school year, paying the drivers directly.

The program starts on Monday, September 26, 2022.

We believe this pilot program will be an impactful and sustainable win-win for the community of Baruyan: employment for the tricycle drivers, providing safe and timely transportation for our students to and from school, while relieving some of the financial pressure on the parents striving to make ends meet.