Welcome to the web site for the Guyana Education Access Project.
This was a five-year Government of Guyana project (Jan 1999 to Dec 2003), funded by the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) and managed by CfBT.
Guyana's Ministry of Education (MOE) has the mission statement:
This statement recognises the right of all to be able to gain access to secondary education, and the need to provide high quality teaching and learning in schools and colleges which are managed and resourced efficiently by teams of well trained staff at all levels.
The main project goal of GEAP supported the MOE mission by aiming to provide sustainable improvement in education quality and access for all children in Guyana, particularly the poorest.
The project worked in two disadvantaged areas to establish improved systems of secondary education, which can hopefully be replicated nationally. All issues of transition were recorded as were strategies to raise levels of student achievement. These were then fed into the national debate on raising the quality of secondary education for all. This web site / CDROM was created to enable the sharing of this information during, and after, the life of the project.
The project worked in Regions 6 and 10 to improve the education for approximately 8000 secondary age students. Work involved improving infrastructure and resources, supporting education management, educating teachers and facilitating community development. The project had seven outputs:
These inter-linked areas of activity led to outputs that contributed to the achievement of both the MOE mission and the project goal of GEAP. Each output had one or more key objectives and a series of activities to meet the key objective.
In Guyana, access to quality education beyond primary school has a marked impact on lifetime opportunities. Guyana has achieved near universal primary education, yet the poor remain disadvantaged with less than 1 in 5 entering full secondary education that will culminate in skills and qualifications sufficient to access employment or further training, and thereby a better life. Furthermore, research shows conclusively that the present system currently discriminates markedly against the poor.
The Guyana Education Access Project (GEAP), to which DFID contributed £12.8 million, addressed the problem on two levels and in two ways. At the central level the project enabled the Government to articulate clear pro-poor policy statements that herald the dismantling of the current divisive system with clear strategies for universalising secondary education. These strategies will be based on the project's experience at school level in the two pilot regions where the reform will start and will make a direct impact on two of the country's poorest areas.