The Poetic Mission of Water
The Poetic Water Mission is a national initiative inspired by Nicaragua’s 1980 National Literacy Crusade, a historic educational movement in which more than 95,000 young volunteers traveled across the country to reduce illiteracy from 50.3 percent to 12.9 percent in just five months, according to data from the Ministry of Education and UNESCO.
This achievement, internationally recognized with UNESCO’s Nadezhda Krupskaya Award, demonstrated the capacity of the Nicaraguan people to unite around the right to education and reading.
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Reviving that spirit, the Poetic Water Mission aims to deliver 500,000 books in three years to children and adolescents in rural areas to improve reading comprehension, foster a love of reading, and position Nicaragua as the country with the highest reading comprehension in Latin America within the next decade.
Context and Rationale
According to recent reports from UNESCO and the World Bank (2023):​
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• 79 percent of primary school students in Nicaragua do not understand what they read, marking the lowest reading comprehension performance in the region.
• This outcome is 27 percentage points below the Latin American average and 18 points below countries with lower middle income.
• The so called learning poverty severely limits the development of human capital, employability, and long term educational progress.
Positive factors include access to preschool education, family involvement, and high parental expectations. Limiting factors include grade repetition, school absenteeism, and deep inequalities in rural and Indigenous communities.
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In response to this reality, the Poetic Water Mission seeks to spark a new wave of poetic literacy by combining large scale book distribution with the creation of five rural libraries featuring community run cafés and bakeries designed to generate income and support local sustainability.
