Centro Las Claras: New Opportunity for Teen Moms

First of all, THANK YOU for your donations and on-going support for The Las Claras Program. Your actions have been key in establishing the program and getting settled in our home in Felipillo.

Las Claras started with the belief in the power of education and the effect that it would have on empowering teen moms. Now, our first group of teen mothers is getting ready to graduate. We are incredibly proud of everything they have accomplished so far, and are sure that the coming months will bring further advances and opportunities for them. 

In august, they started their professional internships through our new initiative called Mi Primer Salario (“My First Salary”) as an alliance with different private companies. Through this program, our teen mothers now have the opportunity to do a professional internship with distinguished companies. Their efforts have paid off, and they have demonstrated their capacity to work for these following enterprises: Banistmo, World Target Supplies, Procesadora Monte Azul, Soluciones Financieras Mi Éxito, Grupo VerdeAzul, Tropical Services, Camero Camero & Asociados, Patton Moreno & Asvat, Bolsa de Valores de Panamá.

We also received a very important visit by representatives of the Juan Felipe Gómez Escobar foundation, who came all the way from Colombia to meet our staff and learn about the developments of our program. This represented a meaningful experience, since our very own Program Las Claras was created as inspiration of the Juan Felipe Gómez foundation, which educates hundreds of Colombian teen mothers that live in extreme poverty.

Both groups of Las Claras have also continued to receive a variety of workshops and classes, on top of the fixed syllabus that will allow them to receive their high school diploma at the end of the year.

One of our favorite parts of the work at Vital Voices Panama, is that it also allows for our programs to find merging points that creates space for collaboration between them. Clear examples are the workshops that our women entrepreneurs, from the Mentorship and Entrepreneurship Program, give to our teen mothers in the Las Claras Program. Through these women, our teens learn about arts, crafts, self-reliance, and empowerment, and it´s definitely one of their favorite aspects on their schedule


As you can see, we´ve come a long way during these past months. The teen mothers at the Las Claras Program have received care, education, and continuous support which allows them to find empowerment previously unknown to them. Still, the reality in our country is one that requires further action: only during 2015, there were 10,975 registered cases of teen and child pregnancy. And this number keeps on increasing, as every teen mom will most likely have a second child during the next 24 months. Worst of all, 75% of these girls will abandon schools. They will lack a plan for the future, self-esteem and confidence to pursue their dreams, a job to support themselves and their babies, and will add numbers to the cycle of poverty that pervades their environment.

Once more, we THANK YOU for your continuous support in this quest for a better quality of life for teen mothers and their children. PLEASE keep donating and invite others to join us in this quest with their donation!

More action still to come. Stay tuned :)