Building the future today!
The Défilée Bazile Academy is designed to develop leaders and problem solvers among the upcoming generation. It aims to create communities of scholars and thinkers around Haiti, particularly in the country’s overlooked rural regions.
The Academy started in 2018, as a pilot consisting of 24 adolescents selected from half a dozen schools in the Artibonite region. These adolescents must have been admitted into the seventh grade – usually around 11 to 13 years of age but no older than 14 years old.
The Academy follows a curriculum that is created with the students’ specific needs and contexts in mind, as demonstrated by our research around the country. The goal is to provide them with mentorship and accompaniment as they develop into young adults. We train them in critical thinking and problem-solving skills. After three years in the Academy, the students graduate and join the Amílcar Cabral Society, where they receive further training and accompaniment into adulthood. At that point, they also begin to serve their communities through volunteering.
We now have a strong model for working with this age group. Starting this coming fall (2023), we are taking the Academy directly to our partner schools. Rather than operating as a stand-alone initiative, we will work with our partner schools to incorporate our program into the schools’ curricula. That way, we will significantly increase our reach and impact.
Selected from five separate schools in Haiti’s Artibonite department, the twelve scholars pictured above constitute the Leadership Academy’s first cohort. Click here for more photos.