"It's easier to build a house than to build up a person," Ketxu Amezua told us on a recent trip to Nicaragua. A simple statement that sums up the challenges of the Program for Human Development (PHD).  While building houses, latrines, and community centers are featured in the PHD project, the real goal is strengthening the capacity of people to be leaders in their communities. 

The great Brazilian teacher Paulo Freire argued that poverty's greatest insult to the human psyche was to erode self-worth and deny the individual the right of self-definition.  Freire emphasized literacy as a path to self-discovery and social awareness. 

Liberating development is our expression of an alternative model in which development is redefined as a process of community empowerment and self-definition, as opposed to phrases like "industrialization," or "modernization" that are the hallmarks of dominant development discourses.

We are committed to a development process characterized by:

1. Non-hierarchical decision-making structures that value everyone's voice;
2. Planning processes that empower community members in Nicaragua;
3. A view of our work as a celebration of human creativity and community.

Follow the progress of the Program for Human Development in Recent Evaluations and Reports

Visit the Communities that we help

The PHD project stands in this tradition.  It seeks to help individuals through education, so that they can collectively direct the future course of their communities and families. Progress is not measured simply by the numbers of bricks laid, but in the broadening of vision, the expression of new dreams, and the conficence and skills to realize them.

With the Program of Human Development (PHD) we are accompanying 15 of Nicaragua's poorest communities and their 16,000 inhabitants on a five-year journey of integral development coordinated by our partners at the Institute of John XXIII.

The center-piece of the PHD project is education. The goal is to raise the average educational level in the communties from 2nd to 6th grade. Already, over one hundred learning circles have been created reaching more than 1,000 students. A school lunch program has been launched to encourage attendance. Adult literacy programs and leadership trainings are also underway. Through the PHD program we will build 800 homes and ensure access to a latrine for every family in the areas we are working. Water systems are under construction in each community as well.