Jackie Maria Guerra Batista
Jackie’s advocacy centres around how education can break cycles of poverty and discrimination in Panama and uses storytelling to raise awareness on issues around access to education, particularly for girls and indigenous communities, including the Ngäbe-Buglé people. She has experience campaigning for intercultural education in Panama after witnessing firsthand how children are forced out of school to work on coffee bean plantations and dedicates her free time to tutoring these children.
“I grew up in Chiriquí, Panama, among diverse landscapes and the rich culture of the Ngäbe Buglé people, the country’s largest indigenous population. My background made me aware of Panama’s profound educational inequalities, where the cost of a textbook can equal two daily meals and lost school days systematically affect academic development. This reality led me to commit to defending education as an enabling right. This story is not isolated; throughout Latin America, access to equitable, quality education constitutes a regional cause that we defend from various spaces, united by the conviction that education holds the key to solving the problems that affect our societies’ development.
This story was written during the intense teacher protests in Panama, a moment of crisis that became an opportunity to demonstrate that hope persists in adversity. Thanks to the journalism project I was able to learn new storytelling tools and applied them in my final project. I was able to show how teachers with an unwavering commitment to their vocation can transform classrooms into spaces of critical thinking and creativity.
I hope this story will lead to deep reflection about rural and indigenous educational contexts. I invite people not to think of rural communities as disconnected spaces, but as places where living stories are woven that can positively change a country’s direction. My primary motivation is to share a different perspective that awakens genuine interest in understanding these educational spaces and deconstructs biases about their value, recognising their transformative potential for the development of the Latin American region.”