May 2024 - Currently, seven of Mona Foundation's twenty-three partner organizations have reached a tipping point where their impact is exponentially multiplied. They are rising in collaboration with their government, other nonprofits, and businesses to catalyze systems change, mobilizing to rewrite and reshape the narratives, policies, and social norms which to date have inhibited millions of students, especially girls, from fully participating in the life of society. Following are two examples.

Badi School, Panama

Badi School started in 1993 as a kindergarten in the carport of a trailer home and has since grown into one of the finest K-12 schools in Panama, serving over 400 students. Badi integrates high quality academics, arts, and technology programs with an inclusive moral leadership program and service. Most Badi School graduates receive full scholarships to the best universities in Panama and elsewhere.

Impressed over the years by the exceptional quality of Badi school’s graduates and their contributions to the betterment of their communities, the Ministry of Education in Panama adopted their moral education curriculum, the key lever of Badi’s outstanding results, as their standard course on religion, implementing it in 3,400 schools reaching about 950,000 K-12 students.

Study Hall Educational Foundation, India

The Aarohini girls’ empowerment program is designed to prevent child marriage and domestic violence in a country where girls are unsafe, unwanted, unequal and unfree.

The program trains girls to see themselves as equal persons deserving of respect, having the right to agency and to voice their protest. The initiative is primarily a teacher training program which equips teachers to enable change in schools and in their communities.

The program has been so successful that in 2022 SHEF signed a 5-year Memorandum of Understanding with the Uttar Pradesh (UP) Ministiry of Education to train over 2,000 teachers in 746 public residential schools for disadvantaged girls to educate and empower more than 100,000 girls.