Viva’s Cutting Edge: How can we Support Education?
“Children need a holistic nurturing, not just their bodies and minds, but their hearts and spirits too.”- Christina Rai
How can we Support Education? Summary
The discussion focused on overcoming barriers to education through community-driven learning spaces in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Key challenges include poverty, resource limitations, learning disabilities, and inconsistent volunteer support. The network in Costa Rica emphasised the importance of volunteers for sustainability in their CAFIs, while in Zimbabwe, Wi-Fi devices were used to provide offline digital learning during COVID-19. CarNetNepal emphasised creating child-friendly environments and empowering parents alongside children. CRANE in Uganda has seen success through teacher training to help them move from rote teaching to innovative, creative learning. Across all four learning space examples, collaboration with local churches, volunteers, and government agencies emerged as critical to sustainability.
Overcoming children’s education barriers in Costa Rica
Natalia Ugalde from Viva’s partner network in Costa Rica explained about CAFIs, which are community centre spaces where children, adolescents, and families receive support for their comprehensive emotional and spiritual development. Children receive tutoring in subjects like maths and reading, counselling, basic food, personalised follow-up and recreation opportunities, while the families are offered pastoral and social support. Through CAFIs, participants also engage with Viva campaigns, including the Good Treatment Campaign, the World Weekend of Prayer Campaign, and Christmas Parties. They also receive counselling and basic food support, because most of the families are low-income. Additionally, 60% of children in Costa Rica reach third grade without any knowledge about how to learn or write; “They have a lot of disabilities, and that means that they need a lot of support at school.” More than 500 children are served bi-weekly from nine communities, with over 300 families being supported. Natalia explained that there was a constant challenge of ensuring committed volunteers were available to support the CAFI programme.
Holistic interventions in Peru
Isabel González explained that at Red Viva Peru, school reinforcement is carried out, but there are also complementary workshops in music, art, values, and, above all, in emotional and spiritual understanding. The children who attend their learning spaces are from low-income homes, with many migrants from Venezuela and other places. Some young people do not have documents and find schooling a challenge, so another element of the project is computer training to build transferable skills. Resilience and emotional stability in the face of bullying are taught, and they provide personalised follow-up for children and their families.
Innovations in Zimbabwe
Widdlack Nyahwedegwe, the coordinator of Viva Network Zimbabwe, shared one major challenge in Zimbabwe: dropout rates. Despite high enrolment rates of 92%, 15% of enrolled children drop out in 3rd grade. Widdlack explained that the network identifies children who have been pushed out of school and places them in a multi-grade learning support centre system that focuses mainly on numeracy and literacy for up to one year. After an assessment and recommendation from the support centre, children can be re-enrolled in school, where continuous monitoring takes place. Another innovation was the use of portable devices that function as a ‘hotspot’ to broadcast Wi-Fi, which were introduced during COVID-19 when e-learning became essential. “So this means, if you are to load, for example, 10 textbooks for 10 children, you just need one textbook license, and then that one textbook license will be utilised by all the children who can connect to that network.” He explained that, on top of this, they trained child safeguarding committees with support from the government and connected with other civil society organisations, leading to initiatives such as birth certificate registration. He noted that 240 children are benefiting each year from the use of learning support centres. The importance of partnership was emphasised: “Our approach there is that we do what we can, and then we connect the children with everyone else they need.”
Increased education access in Nepal
Christina Rai from CarNet Nepal explained that, in 2008, the learning space programme was started with the purpose of supporting vulnerable children to have access to their basic needs of food and education. However, “as the years unfolded, a profound realisation was made, while academic excellence is undoubtedly vital, it's just one piece of the puzzle. We recognised that children need more than just good grades to thrive. They need a holistic nurturing, not just their bodies and minds, but their hearts and spirits too.” Learning spaces take place in communities, especially in local churches, six days a week, and the impact has been wide and deep. They offer comprehensive support to children by fostering a safe and nurturing environment for their academic pursuits, providing opportunities for these children to acquire life skills and social awareness, and safeguarding space. An impact story about a girl called Saru was shared, whose life was turned around after she joined the Learning Space, securing second position in her class, whereas previously she was close to failing.
Critical elements of learning spaces
In a question-and-answer session, the panellists discussed challenges within learning spaces and shared solutions, as well as principles of best practice. These included engaging and effectively training volunteers, working in low-cost ways, prioritising partnership with local communities and churches, having donations in-kind from local people such as farmers, seeking to use local, low-cost resources, the importance of mentoring, the role of parenting training, the need to work with governments, and having child-friendly church spaces. Christina noted the local church is “the key member of the community, and also they are the ones who are called to be light in the darkness.” Alongside this, Isabel noted that local community leaders are essential to run CAFIs in “a sustainable, community-based way” because they take ownership and enhance sustainability.
Victoria Byonna from CRANE in Uganda then expounded about their work in Learning Spaces, particularly related to teacher training and how different skills are needed at different levels: “For example, when they are planning lessons at the introductory level, they want to see the element of differentiation. Before these trainings, our teachers would just teach things in a rote method. But this model helps them to be more specific and intentional, so that at every level of learning and teaching, we need to see every learner being catered for.” She explained they emphasised different learning styles for children, and the importance of making lessons creative, exciting, and fun. Teachers were also encouraged to make individualised education plans for each child: “And the beauty of this model is that it is impressive and integrative. It is not only for the teachers, but also it embraces the parents and other key stakeholders, so that everyone is playing their role to ensure that this child achieves.”
The session ended with some examples of real-life impact and encouraging stories of how carrying out these kinds of holistic, child-focused learning programmes can make a real difference to children and families.
These sessions were from a Cutting Edge conference in July 2025, organised by Viva, an international charity that inspires, equips and connects networks of churches and community-based organisations to work together to make a bigger, better and longer-lasting impact in the lives of children. For more information about Viva or Cutting Edge, please visit viva.org.