School Supplies: Our Core Program
Every year, One Pencil donates pencils, pens, notebooks, and other basic educational resources to thousands of students throughout the Kunene region of southern Africa and to the Tsimane in Bolivia.
The inspiration behind this program comes from our shared understanding that every child begins their learning journey with one pencil. Our founder, Dr. Helen Davis, focused her early research on the effects of school resources on children’s academic performance. She found that greater access to school resources over time improved children’s academic performance.
This program serves two distinct and important purposes. First (and most obviously), providing educational resources gives students tools that are essential to the learning process. Second, and equally critical, the team of scientists affiliated with One Pencil has developed several research projects that consider questions about education, economics, public health, and psychology. Here are just a sampling of questions studied and goals set forth by One Pencil and its affiliated scientists:
How do humans learn more effectively?
Are the generally accepted teaching methods of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich & Democratic (WEIRD) societies the most effective ways to transfer knowledge?
What are the implications (over the life course and even generationally) when schools lack fundamental resources?
In engaging with communities around the world, One Pencil also ensures that any researcher involved is committed to:
Ensuring that the participant communities receive the benefits from new knowledge and continued access to education beyond the tenure of any investigative work.
Supporting the local communities and governments in efforts to expand access to schooling.
Collaborating with professors and educational researchers at universities and in governmental agencies in host countries.
Providing mentorship and training opportunities in host countries and the US.
Sharing results from the work to other operating NGOs and governmental agencies in order to better plan for equitable access to education, plan and respond to emergencies that affect education, and assist in the classification of education as a ‘life changing intervention.’
Notably, the core mission of One Pencil is to continue providing resources year after year (and to grow the program to the extent we have funding to do so). This enables our scientists to conduct “longitudinal” studies across generations. The Tsimane Health & Life History Project began in 2001 and has been the source of great insights that have ultimately become the topics of numerous academic and mainstream publications. We expect similar results in our work in the Kunene region of southern Africa.
The African division of this program wouldn't have been possible without the support of our partners, the Hizetjitwa Indigenous People's Organization (HIPO) and the Namibian Ministry of Education, Arts, and Culture. And special thanks also go to our partners at the Tsimane Health and Life History Project, who assists in our Bolivian operations. Providing educational resources is at the very core of our organizational mission and will be a reliably recurring program that we hope to extend to more schools in the Kunene region of Southern Africa, Bolivia, and beyond.
