By Alka Subramanian | Executive Director
Happy Mother’s Day! On this Mother’s Day, let's pledge to end poverty by supporting and educating vulnerable women and mothers all around the world.
Program Activities Designed to End Poverty
UN Sustainable Development Goals: The United Nations has set goals to end poverty, ensure healthy lives, and provide education to all children by 2030. To help achieve these goals, all program activities are designed to train and educate vulnerable women, keep families healthy, and keep children in school. Given below are highlights of a few program activities completed in 2019.
Business Training and Mentoring: In 2019, 209 new women were provided with a four-day business training. These women replaced the women who graduated successfully earlier this year. This implies that in the first four months of this year, 209 new businesses were started by new entrepreneurs and 209 graduates are continuing to run businesses in the community.
The goals of business training are to empower women by teaching them how to (i) run a business, (ii) overcome challenges, (iii) work as a team, (iv) run a profitable business, (v) become responsible borrowers, and (vi) develop relationships of mutual support with other women. In addition, trainees get an opportunity to discuss business issues and external challenges with mentors in the same line of business.
Business training is participative, hands on, and in the local language as most women have never been to school and many do not know how to read or write. Social issues, possible challenges and how economic independence can lead to empowerment are also discussed.
All 209 women completed the training successfully and were provided with loans to start businesses of their choice. At present, the newly trained women are applying business principles learned during this training every day. Skills acquired during business training are permanent even if the business fails and can be used in diverse ways to improve one’s quality of life. For example, many loan recipients learn to save a small amount each week and are comfortable with mobile banking. The story of a typical loan recipient is given below.
Larger Loans: The new women received larger loans than in the past, with the goal of earning higher revenues and profits.
The activities discussed above result in improved health of families, increase in the number of children in school, better information about HIV, and reduced HIV related stigma.
A typical Loan Recipient
Mary is 34 years old and the sole caregiver for 10 family members (four children of her own, her grandma, and six others). She was taking vocational training classes but had to discontinue due to lack of funds. In early 2018, she was introduced to our micro loans program and subsequently she received business training and a loan. With loan funds, she started a small restaurant, completed repayments on her first loan and is now on her second loan. Earnings from her restaurant help pay for food, medicines and school expenses. She can now afford three meals a day and her two older children (the other too are too young) are in school. In addition, she has been able to go back to vocational training school. She attends classes in the evenings after she closes her restaurant for the day. Mary is working hard to educate herself and her children so that her family can be self-reliant.
We can end poverty
In accordance with the UN sustainable goals, program activities are designed to empower women, alleviate poverty, improve the health of families, and keep children in school. Education and training in income generating skills allows families to break from the cycle of poverty, reduces income inequalities, and helps reach gender equality. Income stability empowers people everywhere to live more healthy and sustainable lives and is crucial to building more peaceful communities.
Thanks for giving vulnerable women impacted by HIV, an opportunity to run successful businesses.
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