Why Clean Water Is Key to Keeping Girls in School

Starting menstruation is tough enough for most girls, but some teenagers have more than just their changing bodies to cope with. For many girls in Bolivia, the start of menstruation can mean the end of their education too. 

Rebecca Peters, an International Development Economics and Global Poverty student at the University of California, Berkeley, is on a mission to stop this from happening. Last summer, Rebecca spent 10 weeks working in Cochabamba, Bolivia, as a partner with the Foundation for Sustainable Development and Water for People to install water treatment systems in schools. 

"I saw the effects of improved water sources in schools, as well as what happens when there aren't any reliable water sources," she says. "One of the problems was that girls tended to stop attending school - or drop out altogether - because there was no safe running water for them to wash with when they were menstruating.

"There's a lot of stigma and taboo associated with menstruating, not just in Bolivia but all around the world. There are very few initiatives targeted at improving girls' education, health and access to safe water. Many girls drop out of school, particularly in neglected migrant and indigenous communities."

Rebecca's response is the Pachamama Project, which aims to improve health and education for girls by providing equal access to safe water and sanitation in schools. Pachamama will launch in Bolivia and Mexico this March in partnership with the Mexico-based non-profit Fundación Cántaro Azul.

"The basic goal of Pachamama is to engage groups who wouldn't normally be talking about Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM) and to put the issue on the water sanitation and hygiene agenda," says Rebecca, who has worked on various water and energy related collaborations in Guatemala, Denmark, France and Mexico - always with an eye toward improving gender equity in the project's outcomes. 

So far, Pachamama has been funded by a grant from the Center for Race and Gender at Berkeley. The Pachamama Project is also a finalist in the human rights category of the Big Ideas at Berkeley competition, but her long-term goal is for the project to become self-sustaining. "I want it to be owned by the community and be something that people really want to continue once I'm not there anymore," she explains. 

It's not just about fitting clean water systems, though. Rebecca recognises that there are deeper cultural and social barriers to girls' education: "There might be some community push back to it, where people aren't willing to participate. Studies of MHM have shown that girls are really shy to talk about menstruation, so making things fun is really important. We need to create games and make things more interactive so it doesn't seem scary or taboo to talk about. 

"One of the initiatives we'll do is give disposable cameras to girls and boys and ask them to go round and take photos of places they deem scary. Previous projects that have done things like this have found that children often take photos of bathrooms and I think that sends a really strong message to development institutions to say 'OK, this is something that we really need to focus on.'" 

It's a big ambition but Rebecca is confident that it will make a big difference to girls' lives. "The goal is to create the girl effect," she says. "I hope that by putting MHM on the water and sanitation development agenda, and by tapping into the human rights discourse, the project can overcome the taboos associated with menstruation and really highlight that it's much bigger than that. It's about education and social justice as well as health."

See source here

The Pachamama website is currently being built but in the meantime you can find out more here or by following Rebecca Peters on Twitter.   

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International Life with FSD- Internships Abroad

Young Workers Benefit from International Experience

FSD executive director Mireille Cronin Mather was interviewed by Military Times and talked about how international internships changed communities and the interns. 

For many young people, the economic downturn has been especially difficult because they’re often competing with more seasoned professionals for jobs once reserved for the less experienced.

Adding to the dilemma is that employers also often profess a preference for those who have international experiences. If you’re among those who haven’t had a tour overseas during the past wars, you may want to consider an international internship.

Unlike some internship experiences, where a company will pay the intern for the work, in many cases, such as that of the Foundation for Sustainable Development (FSD), the interns pay for the experience.

FSD executive director Mireille Cronin Mather says interns pay on average about $4,500 to participate in internships, which can range from weeks to months. There are 228 interns working in six countries, such as Uganda and Argentina. They tackle a variety of community projects, such as microfinancing, she says.

The key to the FSD experience, Mather says, is intensive training and immersion in the local culture to best enable interns to help with critical community projects. FSD has more than 300 community partners and 17 university partners. The program is aimed at students “who want more rigorous training.”

“You’re not going to be teaching English,” she says. “This is hard-core community development.”

Mather says the organization doesn’t just offer internships for young people, but also offers volunteering experiences of shorter times for professionals or groups.

“The professionals who participate find it renews their enthusiasm or just gives them a break from their regular jobs,” Mather says. “They make real personal connections with other people and make a real difference.”

Mather says that while many have criticized the work ethic of young people, she finds Generation Y “is not as jaded” as others and sees “everything with a fresh set of eyes.

“This generation sees the community in different ways. They’ve got a globalized perspective on life. While that perspective available to them has sometimes been negative, we’re very positive and give them that new perspective.”

See the interview here.

Prevent Child Labor - Salta Argentina Youth Voice Issues that Matter Most

Of the 1,214,000 people residing in the city of Salta in Northwest Argentina, 17% live in rural conditions that are dependent on agricultural production for survival. Many of these are young people who sacrifice the opportunity to earn an education in order to make a living in the tobacco fields.

Asociación Conciencia was established to confront the challenges of Salta youth in the labor force. In 2003, Conciencia joined forces with Argentine tobacco companies to establish the Programa Porvenir, which operates educational centers in the rural tobacco zones of Salta and Jujuy. The mission of Programa Porvenir is to prevent child labor and to encourage educational development. Porvenir runs educational programs during the summer months, which provide kids and teenagers a chance to learn vocational skills and understand the importance of education.

This January, a group of UC Berkeley students traveled to Salta on an FSD Global Service Trip in support of the educational programming of Porvenir. The Berkeley students helped Porvenir to lead an audiovisual production workshop for Salta youth, designed to inspire a dialog on youth rights and labor issues. As part of the program, the participants created short films about the issues that mattered most to them. The Salta youth came away with video production skills and a visual expression of their views on human rights, addiction prevention, and gender related violence. Please show your support in watching these short videos, produced by the young people of Salta.

FSD's Experience Catapulted James' Career in Sustainable Community Development

FSD’s International Internship Programs attract an impressively diverse range of participants from around the globe, but undoubtedly the common thread among our Intern alumni is that once they start on the path to sustainable community development, they never stop. James Sarria is an alumnus of two FSD trips, and an exemplar of how our alumni continue to make a lasting difference in every community they touch.

James first volunteered with FSD in 2007 through UC Berkeley’s DeCal Global Service Trip to Nicaragua. He returned to Argentina as a co-organizer of the trip, facilitating the semester-long DeCal course on sustainable development issues in South America. Today James is the Stanford Site Director of the Summer Math and Science Honors (SMASH) Academy, a 3-year 5-week summer math and science enrichment program that is free of cost for high-achieving, first generation high school students of color. The SMASH Academy provides resources to help level the playing field so these students have the same opportunity to achieve success in higher education as their peers in non-marginalized communities.

Working with over 100 students throughout the SF Bay Area requires James to keep a global perspective in mind, and he credits FSD with helping him foster a cross-cultural understanding as well as a passion for service and volunteerism at a young age: “What FSD creates is an opportunity for passionate, ideal and young scholars to experience what can’t be replicated in a classroom. FSD supported my desire to connect with people that are just like me, but just happen to live in another part of the world.” James fondly remembers his Argentinean host family as his favorite part of his trip, and acknowledges that this “importance of local knowledge of the FSD trip mirrors the importance to have local people managing sustainable development projects."

James continues to travel and engage in the international community, recently returning from a month in Bangladesh where he lived with a local family and worked in Lawachara National Park on service trips including reforestation and eco-tourism. In his professional and personal life, James carries the lessons he learned on his FSD trips with him, remarking: “We are all living on the same planet, using her resources and ultimately decisions I make in the US have significant, direct and immediate impact on the lives of people that we may never meet”. FSD is thrilled that interns such as James continue to be the change they wish to see in the world long after they have returned from their internship abroad.

FSD Support Tola Coop Partners with Awarded Grants

FSD was recently awarded a grant from Caridad Partners, a Bay Area women’s philanthropic giving circle, to support our ongoing community cooperatives initiative in Tola, Nicaragua. The grant funds three community cooperatives:

1) Cooperativo de servicios de consumo Mujeres, esperanza y fe sells sundries, food product staples, and other goods at affordable prices and targeting women consumers—and is starting a revolving loan program;

2) Cooperativo Textil Vestuario de Limon, a textile/sewing cooperative, provides quality, low-cost uniforms for local schoolchildren; and

3) Grupo Genesis, a bakery cooperative, is the first female-led enterprise in the Tola region now providing fresh-baked goods locally.

The cooperative initiative is a key driver to stimulating community leadership—and the local economy—in a greatly underserved region of Latin America’s second poorest country. Catalyzing community development since 1995, FSD is leading this region through a community mobilization, skills and leadership development movement.

The cooperative initiative started with a 40-hour training covering government regulations, accounting basics, coop governance, and group dynamics, and FSD is continuing to support the groups through a three-phase plan. The groups have also taken part in a business plan creation workshop and are now receiving ongoing project support as FSD connects the coops to its existing partners in similar fields. The grants will support continued leadership, business and personal development training, and market analysis and capital expansion plans. Over 400 people are estimated to benefit directly from the grant due to the increased income generated by the coops.