Empowering Rural Women with Vocational Skills

Theresa Gaye is a single mother with five children. She dropped out of school while in grade four and was forced by her parents into early marriage. Theresa has four girls and a boy, and the oldest child is fourteen years old. The husband deserted her and went to a distant region in search of gold. Theresa is caught in a web of poverty, regrets, and social exclusion with no future for her and the kids. Life has become so difficult for Theresa and the children that even to obtain a daily meal is a struggle. 

Give Them Hope outreach team came in contact with Theresa. She was encouraged and recruited to join the skills training team in making country soap. Theresa learned to make soap and began selling at various local market days. Theresa now began to receive income from the sale of soap that she produced. Theresa has now succeeded in paying the school and clinic fees for her kids and she also proudly provides meals in the home every day.

The story of Theresa's hardship beginning is the familiar tale of many rural women and girls. The opportunity to provide the platform and support that Theresa received from Give Them Hope through skills training is what is highly needed to rescue many women and girls from the webs of poverty, and hunger with no future for the kids. By investing in this project, you will provide access to skills as empowering tools to very vulnerable rural women and girls in rural Liberia so that they cross over from beggars to nation builders.

The project aims to close the social, economic, and livelihood gaps between men and women in rural Liberia. Rural women and girls in post-war and post-pandemic Liberia face multiple challenges including low standard of living, no means of income generation, extreme poverty, and low self-esteem thereby paving the way for consistent gender-based violence, discrimination, traditions, and practices against women and girls. The project will equip disabled and rural women and girls from low-income backgrounds with marketable vocational skills in tailoring, pastry, sewing country clothes, hairdressing, making soap, and small business management skills.