Helping kids learn to read in their mother tongue

Thousands of Haitian children spend years in school without ever learning to read fluently. The problem isn’t that they’re missing out on education — it’s how that education is delivered. Instruction happens mostly in French, a language most students don’t actually speak at home. Children are asked to decode an unfamiliar language and learn to read at the same time, and for many, that’s simply too much at once. The result is a generation of children who attend school for years but remain functionally illiterate — able to sit in a classroom, but unable to read a simple text with real understanding.

Research in education is clear on this point: children learn to read faster, and more durably, in a language they already understand. Starting with reading in Haitian Creole, then transferring that skill to French, is both the most effective and the most equitable approach. Lire pour Réussir (Read to Succeed) is built around exactly that idea.

This isn’t a parallel activity bolted onto school — it’s designed to fix a gap at the very core of how children are taught to read in the first place. In partner primary schools, the project introduces structured, in-class reading support that begins in Creole, the language children already understand, before guiding them step by step toward French. Thirty teachers are trained in bilingual (Creole to French) reading pedagogy, so the skills stay in the school long after the project ends. Five hundred primary school students, across five partner schools in the Artibonite region and surrounding rural areas, receive reading notebooks and culturally relevant, illustrated materials. Simple reading assessments run at the start, middle, and end of the school year to track real progress, with the goal that 60% of monitored students show measurable improvement within twelve months.

The project also extends beyond the classroom. Short, illustrated take-home reading sheets, written in Creole and also accessible on mobile phones, cover practical, everyday topics like agriculture, health, and the environment. Children bring these home and read them together with their families, which gives the learning immediate, real-world relevance instead of confining it to the school day.

Enrolling a child in school is essential, but it isn’t enough on its own — making sure that child actually learns to read is just as important, and it’s the piece too often left unaddressed. Reading is the foundation everything else in school is built on: without it, math, science, and every other subject become harder to access. Give a child the ability to read fluently in the language they already understand, and you hand them the tool they need to succeed at everything that comes next, in school and beyond it.

We’re looking for people to help us grow this project: partner schools and teachers interested in joining the program, volunteers to support training sessions and material distribution, and donors and partners who want to invest directly in literacy and educational equity in Haiti. Contact us to learn more, get involved, or support this project.