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Guatemala Literacy Project

The Rotary Club of Bromsgrove is delighted to be able to support the Guatemala Literacy Project with a donation of £200. With grant matching arrangements, our donation will become £500 with the support of Rotary District 1060. What is the GLP? The GLP is a network of individual Rotarians, Rotary Clubs and Districts, and the non-profit Cooperative for Education (CoEd), with a common interest in improving education for underserved students in Guatemala. Since 1997, over six hundred Rotary Clubs and eighty Districts around the world have participated in the GLP; in that time, 208,500 students have been helped to escape poverty through four sustainable programmes which are tried and proven to work.
The GLP was also recognized as “the gold standard of Rotary projects” by 2017-2018 RI President Ian Risley. Why Guatemala? Guatemala’s Central and Western Highlands exhibit one of the most extreme combinations of systemic poverty, illiteracy and inequality in the Western hemisphere. The indigenous largely Mayan populations that inhabit these regions suffer from malnutrition (rates which rank among the worst in the world), poor health outcomes, racism, high rates of illiteracy and low levels of educational attainment. Together, these factors virtually guarantee that the next generation will be no better off than the last.  The current grant aims to benefit 8500 children and their teachers to help them to escape their traditional cycle of poverty; four out of five indigenous Guatemalans live in poverty, and more than one in three cannot read or write.