From 24th till 27th of June a fruitful, passionate, intense and clarifying start of INCE Haïti took place at the Woord en Daad office in Gorinchem. Haïtian partners CRECH, FEPH, HaitiTec, P&A and UCNH came to meet with the Dutch Woord en Daad and Driestar Christian University to ‘kick off’ a new collaboration within INCE. Rina Molenaar, Director of Woord en Daad, started the meeting with sharing the dream. ‘We have a dream: to improve the quality of education in Haiti, for the children in Haiti, who deserve the best.’ She told us why INCE was initiated. ‘In the past we saw that the quality of training the teachers was good, but there was no enabling environment. We needed to focus on the school as a whole, but that was not enough. We needed to build a consortium: more schools, institutions and government.’
Many different insights
During the week we talked at how this dream could be realized within INCE Haiti. The many parties together gave many insights, sometimes many different insights. Many topics were discussed: INCE globally, Operationalizing the vision of INCE in Haiti, System Change Thinking and Policy Influencing. All this contributed to the mission of this kick-off: to create a shared and supported goal for INCE Haiti.
In between all serious conversations, there was also time to get to know each other and the Dutch culture, with the now well-known “farmer’s golf”. Though you could say that this game was rather ‘intense’ too!
An entrepreneurial mindset
At the end of the week Jean Dona Darius of UCNH presented on behalf of the group the outcomes of the week. The overall aim of INCE Haiti is to structurally improve the quality and governance of the Protestant Christian education in Haiti through its members, in order to make education more relevant for student and society. The core competency of INCE Haiti will be to facilitate value exchange between members and add new values where needed. In all their initiatives INCE Haiti wants to have an entrepreneurial mindset. Daniel Jean Louis, director of P&A, said: ‘Education is the foundation of entrepreneurship. We need to challenge the children, so they will see the goal they have in their lives.’
It was an intense week, but also a week which shows that if we want to make our dream of better education come true, we have to complement each other, and challenge each other to grow together. ‘We can’t be successful in making a change to the education of our children on our own, but together we can.’