PROGRAM OBJECTIVES

Education

Long acknowledged as vital to a community’s development, our education programming empowers younger generations and lays a foundation for sustainable social change.

Our goals include:

•  Hire an Education Program Manager to oversee the preschool program, scholarship program, village education committees and parent relations

Preschools:

•  Perform thorough assessment of all 6 village schools and teachers

•  Provide parent workshops on the value of early education

•  Refresher training for all teachers

High school:

•  Send 72 young adults to high school through co-sponsorships with their families

•  Develop English language summer school for all interested students

Healthcare

Basic, accessible healthcare is not available to most rural villages in Myanmar.  Our programming helps provide local, village-based health services that focus on prevention and health education, primarily for women and young children.

Our goals include:

•  Train 3-4 Village Health Educators (VHE) in each village to educate young women about safe motherhood, newborn care, child nutrition, and dental   hygiene, and to conduct monthly monitoring of infant and toddler health

•  Create teaching handbooks for VHE’s in newborn care and child nutrition

•  Train one Auxiliary-Midwife Nurse (AMN) in each village to be

responsible for reproductive health care, pre- and post- natal care, communicable disease management and basic first aid

•  Provide twice-a-year dental clinics in each village

•  Establish associations with private clinics in the region to supplement training opportunities and provide caring, quality health care

Economic Development

The average village family has virtually no means to break the cycle of poverty of subsistence farming.  Shanta seeks to create financial growth opportunities for all villagers, especially women, to increase their quality of life and provide funding for village development activities.

Our goals include:

•  Focus on new business creation

• – Establish a separate fund specifically for new business creation, a percentage of which will go specifically towards women’s business
• – Each village will match Shanta’s contribution of $1,000

•  Start a second pig farm program in the village of Tee Lone

- Lend money for pig feed to the poorest families so our model is accessible to all families

- Continue the growth of our current pig farm project in the village of Yim Bya with 30 new families starting pig farms this year

Infrastructure

We partner with villages to provide some of the physical structures and facilities needed for the sustainable operation of their communities.  These are great opportunities for the village development teams to put into practice their training in project planning, participatory management, and sustainability concepts.

Projects this year include:

•  Complete solar lighting for every home in two villages

•  Complete a village water supply project with the construction of water tanks  and a pump

•  Begin the village planning process and construction of a new primary and  middle school in Ta Khae village

•  Support the completion of a road repair project that the village of Sin Mee   proposed and planned

Partnerships with New Villages

Shanta is growing! This year we will:

•  Identify three new villages in    our region to begin sustainable  partnerships

•  Lead community mobilization process and town-  hall type meetings to involve  all villagers

•  Villages will appoint leadership teams and begin to identify their

development priorities and needs