El Colegio de Panama School Gardening and Cooking Program

The El Colegio de Panamá health program is an initiative that includes the creation of a food garden as a classroom, cooking classes and the supervision of the school cafeteria. The school serves 1050 students all of which will be impacted by our health program.

The program development started on 2016 but it is now, at the beginning of Panama’s academic year (March 2017), that we will put all the ideas into action.

At the moment, we are working in the creation of the garden with the students. The produce will be used for the cooking classes and the school cafeteria while working with kitchen staff on serving healthier choices at school.

The school was founded in 2008 with the vision of transforming and innovating in the standards of Panama’s education. The school supports inclusive education and all classrooms have students with various learning disabilities that thrive in our learning environment.

Once again, we want to innovate and be a model for other schools in Panama with our health program and make our actions become a ripple effect in Panama’s education.

In our opinion, Panama suffers a health crisis. The lack of governmental support for the agricultural sector has resulted in a great decrease of people working the land, low production, misuse of the land and soil, massive use of toxic pesticides, gap between the farmer and the buyer, etc. which greatly jeopardizes Panama’s food sovereignty. Moreover, overweight and obesity have impacted our children and teenagers with alarming statistics.

We believe we can make a difference in education that can cast a light over these issues and create more healthy and conscious citizens and leaders of tomorrow.