One Child Matters

Situation

One Child Matters provides medical services as well as activities and education for the children with the help of sponsor donations. The organization works with diverse populations spread across the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, including semi-nomadic tribes such as the Maasai in Kenya and a floating village and school located near Siem Reap, Cambodia. Each country has a facilitator who manages several schools or child development centers in the area, each of which has onsite instructors. In most cases, English is their second, third, or even fourth language, with first languages ranging from Creole and Arabic to Swahili and Hindi. This leads to a variety of training challenges for One Child Matters.

Because 87% of funds go directly to the ministry for the kids, One Child Matters has limited funds to be used for tasks such as training. Field Education & Program Development Specialist Andrew Vanderput needed an affordable solution that could be deployed remotely since routinely sending him or others to train in-person is well out of budget. Further, because the internet is often unreliable in the school locations, he was after something that didn’t require a ton of bandwidth.

Finally, because English is not the first language for the majority of trainees, the tool needed to offer a way to create courses that support visual instruction. “We were sending out very text-heavy training materials and finding out later that not everyone was understanding the material,” says Andrew. “We needed something that was easier for staff to understand, and that would also let us test comprehension in real-time.”