UEnd Blog

Project snapshot:

• Lives affected (including yours): 50

• Project cost: $15,559t

• Dollars raised $595

• Dollars needed: $14,964

• Cause Sector: Education, Gender Equality

Project Description:

To build the capacity of indigenous Mayan women to lead their families and communities to increased well-being, including better health and higher incomes, through leadership and asset management training. Participant savings will be matched one to one (to a maximum of $100) for an investment selected by each participant.

This five year project will improve the quality of life and standard of living of families in marginalized communities in Guatemala through the promotion of women’s education, leadership, health and economic development.

This project provides weekly leadership classes to women in marginalized communities; it utilizes weekly classes to train women in financial management (including budgeting and savings) and family health matters; and, it also promotes asset accumulation among needy women through one to one savings matches (incentives) 

Students will be given the opportunity to accumulate savings in a formal financial institution during their participation in classes as part of financial training; these savings will be matched, one to one, up to a maximum of $100 per student, upon their successful graduation from the Program, and applied toward a project or item benefiting their family or community.

Guatemala is a country located in Central America, bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Belize to the northeast, the Caribbean to the east and Honduras and El Salvador to the southeast. It’s areas is 108,890 km² with an estimated population of 13,276,517.

When researching Guatemala it is remarkable to find that the country suffers from a great imbalance of economic, resource and opportunity distribution. This kind of imbalance can be generally attributed to a lack of education and lack of access to productive resources. Our POTW focuses on rectifying this imbalance to bring productive development into the hands of the very people who can benefit most.

As most of us are aware, deficiencies in education generally lead to higher poverty levels, greater suffering from diseases and poorer living conditions due to an inability to know what to do to better ones situation. By teaching Guatemalan women financial management, dealing with family health matters and by promoting business growth, this project enables their own personal growth and the prospect of betterment and a personal sense of accomplishment that will affect many generations to come.

As of April 2011, a total of 567 women had benefited from micro-loans and/or business training which increased their capacity to generate and control income and enhanced their abilities to manage their resources. This has put the power to grow and thrive in their own hands and has enhanced the lives of the women involved, their families and children and, therefore, prepared the next generation to succeed in the future.

UEnd:Poverty, in partnership with CAUSE Canada wishes to continue to assist Guatemalan women and their families in their growth and knowhow, enabling them to become self-sufficient, through education and their own, assisted business development efforts.

Your donations to this project initially touch the lives of a few but the ripple this causes affects generations. With projects like this it is easy to see how a little can turn into a world of difference for someone else and bring us steps closer to ending world poverty.

How can you help? Follow this project on the UEnd.org website and if you feel like this is something you’d like to donate to, please do. Or if you have a special occasion coming up like a family members or a friends birthday, send them a UEnd gift card for this project.

sources: Wikipedia

Always as a part of any series there are one or two projects that are highlighted to show you how a theme or cause area can be addressed on the ground in real time. That is what we are looking at in this blog.

This project is delivered by Cause Canada. It is based in Guatemala.
It provided weekly leadership and literacy classes to women in the marginalized community of Comitancillo. The women took classes to train them in financial management (including budgeting and savings), family health matters, basic reading and math skills and also promoted asset accumulation among needy women through one to one savings matches (incentives).

Students were given the opportunity to accumulate savings in a formal financial institution during their participation as part of financial training. These savings were matched, one to one, up to a maximum of $100 per student, upon their successful graduation from the Program. This was then applied toward a project or item benefiting their family or community. Further to this program was a microcredit and business development program that allowed these newly educated women to start their own businesses, but that is a story for another blog.

Outcomes of this project are listed as follows:
•Increased sense of dignity and self-efficacy of women.
•Higher literacy rate for women and girls due to role modelling and mutual tutoring.
•Community decisions take women’s viewpoints and concerns into account; more respect for women’s rights.
•Improved health among women and families; less preventable illness, incapacity and death.
•Increased household savings and asset accumulation by women.

Now couple this information with that of the previous two blogs where looked at gender equality as it relates to poverty… you can see that this program addressed many of the focus areas that have been shown to lead women and their dependents out of poverty; community leadership, family health, literacy and the importance of education, financial management skills.

Really, what women need in many cases is the education, community understanding and the opportunity to move forward with project support and they hit the ground running.

This post won’t be a long one. It is the second in the series that looks a gender equality as it relates to poverty.

I will start with attaching the link to the International Poverty Centre which is a UN Development Program. This group conducts research on the various causes and solutions to poverty. They produce a magazine called Poverty in Focus, usually with a specific theme. It is a mighty interesting read with some research heavy information but also some approachable articles that even the lay person can understand.

The Poverty in Focus issue I am highlighting is from early 2008 and it is looking at Gender Equality as it relates to poverty.
There are multiple articles within the issue but the following group struck me:
- Ruth Alsop and Paul Healey wrote about finding that gender inequality is a major barrier to economic growth and poverty reduction and that there needs to be a calling for bold policy action to challenge social institutions.
- Andrew Morrison, Dhushyanth Raju and Nistha Sinha summarised a World Bank study showing a robust relationship between gender inequality and poverty; poor women’s paid work plays a key role in getting their families out of poverty.
- John Sender presented data indicating that when women in rural Mozambique have greater autonomy, daughters are less likely to be neglected; rural wages provide an escape route from poverty for a new generation of women.
- Ranjula Bali Swain and Fan Yang Wallentin used evidence from India that microfinance may lead to increased empowerment, self-confidence, respect and esteem for women.

Give it a read, this issue is only 28 pages or you could read the parts that interested me from their summaries. There is no doubt, you will come out the other side with vastly more information about gender equality and its role in poverty now and its potential solutions.

Good afternoon all,

Hope your Monday is developing nicely…

This entry will be the first in the next UEnd series, this time exploring Gender Equality. Gender Equality is one of eight different causes that are known to effect extreme poverty. Since we believe in a sustainable approach to ending poverty, Gender Equality makes the grade. If you review our project database click here, you will see that of all the cause areas on our site, the largest numbers of projects exist in this area. There is good reason for this, behold the following information…
Here are some facts taken from the Gender Equity pages within the End Poverty 2015 website.
- Of the 1.3 billion people living in poverty around the world, 70% are women. (Source: World Revolution)
- Women do about 66% of the world’s work in return for less than 5% of its income. (Source: Women’s International Network)
- In the least developed countries nearly twice as many women over age 15 are illiterate compared to men. (Source: UNFPA)
- Two-thirds of children denied primary education are girls, and 75% of the world’s 876 million illiterate adults are women. (Source: AskWoman)
- Women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours, produce half of the world’s food, and yet earn only 10% of the world’s income and own less than 1% of the world’s property. (Source :World Development Indicators, 1997, Womankind Worldwide)

Now a definition… as is taken from Wikipedia: “Gender equality (also known as gender equity, gender egalitarianism, or sexual equality) is the goal of the equality of the genders or the sexes,[1] stemming from a belief in the injustice of myriad forms of gender inequality.”

It is interesting to note that “The United Nations Population Fund declared gender equality “first and foremost, a human right.”[5] “Gender equity” is one of the goals of the United Nations Millennium Project, to end world poverty by 2015; the project claims, “Every single Goal is directly related to women’s rights, and societies where women are not afforded equal rights as men can never achieve development in a sustainable manner.” Thus, promoting gender equality is seen as an encouragement to greater economic prosperity.”


For further reading try this newsletter from International Woman’s Day entitled Poverty has a Woman’s Face.

A website with further information is the United Nations Development Fund for Women.

There are lots of other sources, but given just the brief intro into the subject, it is near impossible to deny that something needs to be done to give women in the developing world the hope and opportunity to make both her own and her family’s future.

Now how do you think you can help? Let’s start a conversation. Go to our facebook page uend foundation or add comments here.