The World Bank and UNICEF estimate that 80% of children in Latin America cannot understand a simple written text by the end of primary school. In Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama, where School the World works, the crisis is even more acute. Rural and indigenous public schools are chronically under-resourced: in 2023, School the World monitored 40 public schools in Guatemala where students averaged just 12 hours of instruction per week. Classrooms are often multilingual, teachers lack training in foundational literacy and numeracy, and most families have no means to support learning at home. Grade-level curriculum advances regardless of whether children have mastered the skills it requires, leaving the most vulnerable further behind with every passing year.
Our own diagnostic data confirm what the statistics suggest: across Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama, between 70 and 93% of students enter our program at the lowest reading level, unable to recognize letters. These are not children who are slightly behind. They are children for whom the classroom, as it currently exists, was never designed to work. Without a structured intervention that meets each child at their actual level, functional literacy and numeracy remain out of reach.
As the World Bank states in its brief: "This learning crisis threatens countries' efforts to build human capital and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), undermining sustainable growth and poverty reduction."
We adapted Pratham's TaRL model to local contexts and languages and incorporated playful learning techniques to create our In-School Accelerated Learning Program. We hire and train tutors in the methodology and send them to each school to provide each student with five hours of small group tutoring per week over six months. Students are evaluated and grouped by skill level, and tutors use play as a primary method to strengthen literacy and numeracy.
Students across three cohorts (2022–2025) in Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama have shown statistically significant gains in both reading and math.
We track the percentage of students reaching functional literacy (Levels 4–5 on our 5-level framework), with a 60% target by program end.
Guatemala (4th grade, 2025): Baseline: 10% at functional literacy. Result: 80% reached functional literacy, exceeding the target.
Honduras (3rd grade, 2025): Baseline: 27% at functional literacy. Result: 77% reached proficiency, surpassing expectations.
Panama (4th grade, 2025): Baseline: 5% at functional literacy. Result: 47% reached proficiency in Year 1 of a two-year cohort, on track based on prior cohort trajectories.
These are just some examples. We have extensive data available for both reading and math for each grade participating in the program.
Since 2022, School the World has built a tutoring program that continues to expand its reach throughout Central America. Beginning in Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama, we started with 2,557 students in our first year. The impressive learning gains secured funding from the Tinker Foundation to continue with the first cohort for two additional years.
Results helped us secure additional funding to grow from 2,557 students in 2022 to 6,333 in 2023, then 7,893 in 2024, and 11,532 in 2025. We are currently in our fourth cohort, reaching over 2,000 additional students across Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama. Since the program began, we have trained 139 dedicated tutors across participating communities. In 2023, we introduced a teacher training component and have since trained 880 teachers in this proven methodology.
Looking ahead, we are launching a fourth cohort in 2026 across Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama with a more cost-effective intervention model, and in 2027 we will launch our fifth cohort with which we will be expanding to at least 32 additional schools and bringing our cumulative reach to an estimated 17,500 students. We also hope to partner with and train smaller local organizations to build local capacity and reach more children affected by learning poverty.
At first, we focused on refining assessments and expanding our reading and math curricula after finding many students performing below expected levels, integrating foundational pre-literacy and pre-math skills. We strengthened tutor training and support, and built feedback systems, including WhatsApp groups for real-time coaching, that allow tutors to co-create and enrich a growing manual of effective strategies. In 2023, we began training classroom teachers in the methodology to build sustainability and scale.
More recently, we refined the program based on implementation data. We streamlined our learning progression by reclassifying certain advanced steps as optional enrichment activities rather than obligatory milestones, keeping the focus on core fluency skills. We replaced multi-day formative assessments with brief one-minute timed checks, one for reading and one for math, reducing individual assessment time from around 10 minutes per student to three, and reclaiming that time for active tutoring. We also restructured our tutoring cycles so that every session includes both reading and math practice, with planned activities during assessment time to maximize learning minutes. These changes reflect our belief that fluency in both reading and math is the essential foundation for comprehension, and that every minute of tutoring time should be purposeful.
Identify the total population to be addressed with the program, and a leadership team to undertake its execution as a first step.
Once you have the general information of the target group, contact Bianca Argueta, our Regional Programs Director to evaluate together if our methodology is adequate to your needs and context. See also the Implementation section below.
