Creating Global Citizens: The Panwapa Project (Report‪)‬

Children today are growing up in an increasingly globally-connected society. While globalization is bringing individuals across the world closer together, offering tremendous opportunities and change, it is also requiring children to develop skills, perspectives, and competencies to understand and navigate this interconnected world. However, there are few resources or international efforts that provide young children the basis for these lifelong perspectives and competencies that will help them to meet the demands of the world of tomorrow, today. To help prepare a new generation of children for life in our increasingly global and interdependent world, Sesame Workshop and the Merrill Lynch Foundation formed a partnership to create Panwapa (a word from the Tshiluba language that means "here on this earth"), an international, multi-media project aimed at fostering the foundation for global citizenship skills and community activism in young children. This article builds on Cole (2008), who first wrote about the Panwapa initiative, and provides a summary of findings from an evaluation of the program. The Panwapa initiative engenders global awareness by nurturing and modeling basic civic values, such as fairness, mutual respect and understanding, justice, appreciation of diversity, accountability for one's actions, and a general desire to work for the common good. Just as learning to count and familiarity with the alphabet provide fundamentals for math and literacy learning, Panwapa offers the building blocks of good global citizenship.