There are few moments more moving than watching children carrying their desks down a mountain trail into a brand-new classroom. Resting them above their heads, they march together; laughing, singing, and shouting with excitement. The older students make extra trips to help the younger ones, but everyone carries something.
For the children of La Colonia #1, a small farming community tucked into the mountains of Nicaragua, that walk was the culmination of a long-awaited dream.
For years, students at the school learned in a wooden-plank shed built as a community initiative with the limited resources they had. It was a much-needed place to learn, but enrollment outgrew expectations and time took its toll.
“The conditions were very precarious,” recalls teacher Julio Adán Ochoa. “The children were heaped together. The roof leaked, and the floor was dirt, which created a lot of dust. That didn’t allow the children to have a good learning experience.”
When the opportunity to build a new school with BuildOn arrived, the community embraced it. Mothers and fathers organized and volunteered hundreds of days of labor to make the project a reality.
“Yes, of course!” says mother Eylin Raquel Chavarría when they first started building. “We’re all involved in this work—women and men—because it’s something we’ve been waiting for. This opportunity came to us, and we will support it with all our strength and energy.”
Strengthening Communities
Building awareness and partnering with people willing to transform their community is BuildOn’s goal. BuildOn provides materials and qualified labor. The community mobilizes men and women for the construction effort. In that process, they gain skills and create an organizational structure that helps them address other challenges.
BuildOn calls this collaboration ignition—the moment a community realizes that the power to shape its future has always existed within itself. The school is only the first step. The real transformation is social. It comes when men realize women are capable of rising to the challenges, even beyond their own expectations, earning admiration and respect through their contribution.
More Than a School
A recent study funded by DataPhilanthropy, QQ Research, and Altai Consulting found that communities that partnered with BuildOn saw a 66 percent increase in school enrollment. To date, BuildOn has built more than 3,200 schools across eight economically developing countries around the world.
BuildOn also helps promote gender equity. As part of the covenant a community signs before building a school, they must commit to sending boys and girls to school in equal numbers. According to UNICEF, girls who receive an education are less likely to marry young, earn higher incomes, and build better futures for their families.
Once inside the classrooms, children settle down, savoring the moment. No more dust in the summer or mud in the winter. No more running around with their desks to save their notebooks from dripping water. Just gratitude to everyone who thought they deserved better and decided to do something about it.
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How to Help
BuildOn unites people through service and education to ignite opportunity. A gift to BuildOn helps fund school construction, adult literacy programs, and enrollment support for children who are still out of school. It also helps equip young people in buildOn’s U.S. programs to serve their communities, grow as leaders, and see themselves as part of the solution.
Sergio Manuel Matus Peralta is the Global Impact Manager at buildOn, where he works to strengthen impact measurement, storytelling, and program quality across the organization’s country programs. A civil engineer by training, he has spent more than a decade partnering with rural communities throughout Nicaragua to expand access to education and support community-led development. He is passionate about impact storytelling and believes that meaningful, lasting change is achieved with communities, not for them. Sergio lives in Estelí, Nicaragua, with his wife, their son, and their two dogs, Lucky and Lilly.
