International Women's Day 2017
Visionaria Perú – a Rotary Foundation-supported leadership and self-empowerment project in Peru’s Sacred Valley. Colorado Rotarians launched the summer program for adolescent girls with career and community-service aspirations. The project team hopes to generate measurably effective and sustainable empowerment projects worldwide. Peru is the first step on that ambitious journey.
Rotary Club of Boulder - In Peru, women suffer higher rates of poverty and unemployment than men. About 50 percent of Peruvian women in the Sacred Valley region, which lies outside Cusco, will suffer severe physical or sexual intimate-partner abuse during their lifetimes, the World Health Organization reports. Peruvians – particularly in rural areas – endure high levels of smoke from cooking over indoor fires. About 4 million of the country’s 30 million residents lack access to clean water. Untangling such a knot is difficult. In 2012, members of the Rotary Club of Boulder’s New Generations pilot satellite club came up with a plan to address all of those problems by concentrating on empowering local women – specifically in their ability to make and act upon their decisions.
On an early January morning in Urubamba’s La Quinta Eco Hotel, young women gather for a weeklong leadership training institute through Visionaria Perú. The girls – the team calls them visionarias (female visionary, in Spanish) – come from both the bucolic Andes and the noisy city. Most receive tutoring, scholarships, and other help from Peruvian nonprofits such as project partner Peruvian Hearts, which supports Rosa.
Sitting in a circle, the young women each take a small piece of paper and write a fear they harbor. They put their paper in a hat, and each (anonymous) fear is read aloud and discussed. Genevieve Smith, a Rotarian and program director of Visionaria Perú, works with them to understand that shame and fear need not stifle their personal or professional growth.
This “fears in a hat” exercise is one of the lessons taught during the institute, in which visionarias are coached on leadership skills, professional growth, environmental awareness, and self-esteem. The training follows a 150-page curriculum developed by Colorado Rotarians in partnership with local Peruvian professors and experts.
“Before, I never really thought much about how I treated myself. I always used to tell myself ‘You can’t’ and ‘You’re so stupid because you messed up,’ ” one participant says after the training. “But not now. Now I know I should treat myself better. And I know that when I fail, it’s just a chance to learn how to do something better the next time around.”
At the end of the institute, the visionarias form teams and enter one of three activism tracks: improved cookstoves, water and sanitation, or solar lighting. The activism tracks give participants the chance to exercise their skills by working on sustainable development projects they envision and carry out from beginning to end.
Members of the Rotary Club of Cusco attend portions of the leadership institute to review and provide feedback on the girls’ community project plans. They also participate during implementation of the projects and attend the final celebration to review and support the girls’ achievements. A mentor and local NGOs assist each team in project planning and implementation, and Rotary Foundation-supported vocational training team members such as Smith participate.
The project started in 2012 when Smith, then a Rotaractor, was in Peru through her studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and visited a hogar (home for girls) supported by Peruvian Hearts. There, she asked the girls what kind of support they would need as they got older. She found out that while the students in Peruvian Hearts’ college prep program were smart and qualified to attend a university, they lacked confidence and felt discriminated against because of their indigenous, and often troubled, backgrounds. Smith crafted a project plan to support the girls by the time her bus took her back to where she was staying.
Marika Meertens, a Rotarian with experience at Engineers Without Borders, pitched the Peru project to the Rotary Club of Boulder’s New Generations members. And Abigale Stangl, who has been working alongside one of her instructors at the University of Colorado to produce metrics that show how well the project works, “got on board as soon I heard about the project,” she recalls.
The trio is the driving force behind the project. They assumed roles reflecting their strengths: Smith with planning, Meertens in fundraising (including two global grants totaling $55,000 from The Rotary Foundation), Stangl with project evaluation.
Against this backdrop, only 50 per cent of working age women are represented in the labour force globally, compared to 76 per cent of men. What’s more, an overwhelming majority of women are in the informal economy, subsidizing care and domestic work, and concentrated in lower-paid, lower-skill occupations with little or no social protection. Achieving gender equality in the world of work is imperative for sustainable development.
- See more at: http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/international-womens-day#sthash.2s0I2FK6.dpuf
The 2017 theme for International Women’s Day, 8 March, focuses on “Women in the Changing World of Work: Planet 50-50 by 2030”.
The world of work is changing, with significant implications for women. On one hand, technological advances and globalization bring unprecedented opportunities for those who can access them. On the other hand, there is growing informality of labour, income inequality and humanitarian crises.
- See more at: http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/international-womens-day#sthash.2s0I2FK6.dpuf