Knowing how to read and write can pave the way to success, but academic ability doesn’t always help us overcome problems. This edition of Learning World explores how three projects are empowering local communities by teaching life skills that will help them deal with life’s physical and emotional challenges.

The first report is fromLiberia which has been devastated by the recent Ebola outbreak and where over 3,300 have died. Many schools have been forced to close but now Unicef has trained around 5,000 teachers to pass on skills, methods and information on how to help prevent the spread of this deadly epidemic.

“If I had to pick today between going through the bullying I went through or the cancer I went through I’d pick cancer.” Those are the chilling words of Louis Philippe Thibault and sum up the torment he went through when he suffered at the hands of bullies.

In the second report the programme follows Phillipe as he travels across his home country of Canada to talk about his experiences and help children learn how to deal with bullying.

Providing access to education is one of the first steps towards breaking the cycle of poverty. The programme’s third report travels to Kenya and the remote Masai Mara

There a project called “Adopt a Village” has identified that in order to lift marginalized indigenous communities out of poverty, education is needed but not only education. So one organisation is taking a holistic approach by equipping families with the skills they need to achieve this.