Now imagine if you are a woman, brought up having to obey the family dictum and with a limited circle of interaction. You may be seen as a burden to an impoverished family, yet have to bear the weight of caring for its members.

Imagine now you have summoned the courage to step up before a panel of local officials, all older than you, all male, and perhaps of another class and caste. What will you say?

Majeda Begum Shiru says that in her community of Patiya in the south eastern Chittagong district of Bangladesh, her fellow citizens are not afraid to speak up.

"The women say, 'I am unable to send my child to school. How do you plan to solve that problem?' Because of these kinds of questions being asked, [the officials] must answer to the public directly."

It was not always this way. Shiru herself rarely used to go into government offices. "Even if I did, I felt uncomfortable," she says. A local NGO, Bangladesh Nari Progati Sangha (BNPS), with support from USAID, provided public speaking and leadership training to Shiru and many other women, strengthening their confidence and ability to engage in public.

Today Shiru has become one of the locally-elected officials she used to fear.

Shiru is a leader in the District Public Policy Forum (see her pictured right with her with her fellow forum leaders), where citizens and civil society groups engage with local members of Parliament, departments of education and health, and local government officials to discuss issues of importance to the community. These forums in Bangladesh are supported by a USAID and Asia Foundation project called "Promoting Democratic Institutions and Practices", and in the Patiya District by USAID's local partner BNPS. The process of having regular forums such as these raises awareness of government's responsibilities among citizens, and can lead to reduced corruption or abuse of government funds when Parliamentarians are more connected to the issues the community faces on a day-to-day basis.

"Women can now speak out and voice out their problems directly. The MP [promises] his community that their concerns will be discussed in the house of Parliament," Shiru explains.

Strong women like Majeda Begum Shiru are using the forums to address the high rates of maternal mortality and primary school drop-outs in their area. Recently, during a District Public Policy Forum (DPPF) meeting in Patiya, the group Shiru leads to support the local hospital successfully advocated for adding an additional doctor to the gynecology ward and improvements to the ambulance. In response to calls from Shiru and the community to improve the education system, the local school will soon be providing breakfast and lunch for the students on a trial basis, in an effort to encourage better attendance.

"Whenever there is a school gathering, or any sort of general gathering in the area, there are a large number of women present. We speak out to make these pressing issues known," says Shiru. "It is only after I joined the DPPF that I found out new ways to empower women. I saw that to acquire [government] funds, we had to exert a lot of pressure to get it."

USAID invested in long-term skills development in women in the "Promoting Democratic Institutions and Practices" Project to ensure they can share their concerns and opinions regarding health and education needs for themselves and their families in public meetings well into the future.

At the Patiya District Public Policy Forum in July 2012, the convener Pankaj Chakroborti said, "Citizens, they are aware of their rights and thus can demand for better treatment, so the scenario is slowly changing. The authorities at all levels, in all sectors, are becoming more proactive."

Shiru believes this will continue. "BNPS has opened our eyes about our rights and place in the community, we have learned how to speak up for ourselves," she says. "We will continue to do so long after this project has expired."

In recent years, the US government launched policy reforms that make US foreign aid more accountable to you and local leaders like Majeda Begum Shiru.

Aid works best when it supports local actors to take action and change the circumstances which place or keep them or their fellow citizens in poverty—supporting them to build a dream, build a business, support their family, or help their community.

That's why Oxfam America is working to deepen the US government's commitment to making aid more effective. They can do so by putting more US aid dollars directly in the hands of people like Majeda Begum Shiru.

Read more stories at: www.oxfamamerica.org/aidworks/

Note: Oxfam America doesn't take federal funds, but we do support effective development programs. In 2012, the Aid Effectiveness Team conducted research to highlight effective uses of the 1% of foreign aid the U.S. government spends on poverty reduction and other life-saving assistance. The people featured in this series are not necessarily receiving direct assistance from Oxfam.

Last year thousands voted via mobile phones for the winners of Tanzania's national competition, whose stories were shared with about 25 million people via TV and the media. This year’s winners will also be determined by public voting, and will be announced on World Food Day, October 16.

Below, Oxfam’s Mwanahamisi Salimu profiles one of Tanzania’s 15 Female Food Hero finalists, Sister Martha Waziri. Read about the other finalists on Oxfam’s East Africa blog.

Everywhere I travel in Tanzania I meet women who work the land, but are unable to own or inherit it because of cultural restrictions. In Kondoa district in Dodoma I met a remarkable woman, Sister Martha Waziri, who was determined to change this.

Now 45 years old, Martha began her campaign to reclaim land in 1984. As a young woman she began her calling in the Catholic Church, enrolling in Catholic schools but forced to drop out three times due to ill health. Disheartened and landless, and with no hope of inheriting land from her parents, she saw a possibility to claim a wide sand-ridden seasonal furrow on the border of her village.

The land was completely barren and none of the men wanted it. But not everyone shared 17-year-old Martha’s vision, and when she asked the local authority if she could use it, they laughed at her.

“I became an object of ridicule to other villagers, and when my first attempt to reclaim land failed it was a bonus to them,” she recalls.

Eventually, though, she managed to claim 18 acres of that land. As both a farmer and a pastoralist, she now cultivates 9.5 acres of this land, growing sugarcane, maize, sweet potatoes, cassava, bananas, and a variety of beans. She also rears eight goats and 26 chickens.

She has reaped the economic benefits of her initiative, but has also become a beacon of change in the village. More than 300 villagers, organized into five groups, have now emulated her.

Donasian Kassian, a fellow villager, told me: “When we joined Sister Martha in reclaiming sand-ridden furrows, people dubbed us mad. But 28 years ago this place was a huge useless canal. Today we eat sugarcanes, maize and beans from this land.”

Following her religious calling, Sister Martha has supported 12 orphans and vulnerable youth over the years. Her farms have secured food for her extended family and generated a reliable income to build 10 rooms that the orphans can call home, and from where they can pursue their dreams.

Sister Martha’s success has not been without challenges. She says her first experience of climatic changes was when her fishpond dried up as water levels in the area decreased. She says the land has become increasingly dry, affecting her banana farm most of all.

Sister Martha is not an agro-science expert. She doesn’t use high-tech machines. But this extraordinary woman from an ordinary rural community has made a substantial contribution to conserve her environment and made a remarkable difference in the lives of her fellow villagers. I cannot acknowledge her in any better way than to call her a Female Food Hero.

Balcha, a 36-year-old widow, has brought us to her home here in the Ethiopian community of Mallima Bari as a sort of bench mark—a way for us to understand where she is in her life at this moment and where she’s determined to go now that she has access to irrigation and the support of a network of other small farmers like herself.

“I will reconstruct my house and show you a better house,” says Balcha firmly. “When I change my house, I will make you coffee.” In Ethiopia, ceremoniously serving guests coffee—three piping hot cups per person—is an important social tradition.

Recently, Balcha joined a group participating in a project launched by Oxfam America’s partner, Sustainable Environment and Development Action, or SEDA. Tapping a well that they helped dig and that SEDA and Oxfam outfitted with a pump and pipes, Balcha and 34 other farmers are funneling water to nine hectares of  land--about 24 acres, or a little more than half an acre each. Now, at last, they are free from worry about whether the rain will come on time and in sufficient quantity to guarantee their harvests. With a flick of a switch, they have water on demand—water to feed their crops and build their dreams.

Sitting in front of a field crowded with tall corn, Balcha beams with a surety that would not have been possible a year or so ago. Grief consumed her then: Her oldest child, a 9-year-old boy, had drowned one day while she was away working as a laborer. His dream had been to go to school and he had begged her to send him. But Balcha didn’t have the means.

“He asked me, ‘please, my mom, buy me an exercise book,” she recalled. Her answer? “Next year I can buy you an exercise book and clothes, but this year we don’t even have food.”

Two months later, she said, the terrible accident happened.

In the year that followed, burdened by needs that she could barely meet, Balcha said she thought about leaving her family and running away.

“I was confused,” she said softly.

It was around then that she learned of the irrigation project and the opportunity to join it.

“I was suffering before I joined this project because I didn’t have my husband. I didn’t have any support,” said Balcha. ”Now I have clothes for my body, food for my stomach, and my field is in good condition. When you are hungry, you can’t think of getting satisfied. When you are thirsty you can’t think of getting enough water. But now I’m satisfied.”

A voice for many

Balcha’s story speaks for others in a district where many rural residents make their living by raising animals and cultivating crops on fields fed only by rain. But it’s a hard life—and sometimes an impossible one. In this Central Rift Valley, severe food shortages are a frequent problem.

Without money to put into better production—fertilizer for plants, and infrastructure for irrigation—farmers can’t easily coax much from their land. Instead, like Balcha, they rent their fields to investors who can afford the technology to reap bountiful harvests. And sometimes, small farmers become day laborers on land that is theirs, working for someone else’s profit instead of their own.

But for the group now tilling this 24-acre plot, a reliable source of water could change their lives and the lives of their families. The project is part of a broader Oxfam America water program, set to run through 2020, that works with communities and local partners to help some of the poorest Ethiopians in moisture-stressed regions access water for their fields and animals and manage the resource in a sustainable fashion. With water comes food—and resilience.

Here, in Mallima Bari, the hope is that farmers will begin to cultivate valuable market crops—onions, tomatoes, green peppers, cabbages—that could boost their incomes. From the sale of their harvests, participants, who have formed the Mallima Gale Small-Scale Irrigation Co-op, will pool 10 percent of their earnings toward keeping the irrigation enterprise running. One of the biggest costs is fuel, now running at about 17 birr per liter—close to $4 a gallon. It takes about six liters of fuel each time a farmer pumps water through a half-acre field.

Strength in community

But it’s not just the pump and water that have brightened prospects for Balcha, it’s the deeper connection she has made with her neighbors in the irrigation group and the spirit of cooperation.

“We have very good collaboration,” says Balcha, noting that she had her fields plowed with the help of co-op members and their oxen. Ethiopians measure their land in hectares. One hectare is nearly equal to 2.5 acres. Balcha’s irrigated plot of corn measures a quarter hectare. In addition, she has a half-hectare of rain-fed corn and a quarter hectare of Ethiopia’s staple grain, teff, which is also dependent on the rain.

New agricultural techniques she learned through SEDA could help her crops do better than they have in the past, and the results so far have made her optimistic. She is planting her corn in rows now instead of broadcasting it loosely, and expects the December harvest will produce enough to feed her family as well as some to sell.

“Physically, it looks healthy,” says Balcha. “When you look at it, you get encouraged.”

And with that feeling of encouragement comes the taste of possibility: For Balcha, that means school for her children—an opportunity she never had.

“Had I had an education, I would have been someone better than I am now,” says Balcha. “I’m in darkness myself. I want them to be in light.”

Oxfam's work—whether helping Guatemalan women organize to fight gender violence, funding irrigation projects in Ethiopia, or standing with people in Darfur—is about building the resilience of local communities over the long haul. We cannot prevent shocks, but we can help our sisters and brothers access some of the same resources we have to cushion us when times are lean.

We cannot rush from crisis to crisis with short-term fixes. What more evidence do we need than what is happening in East Africa now? This is not the region's first famine, but imagine the headline: Africa's last famine.

The main training is in Ghana’s Minerals and Mining Act, which accords citizen’s rights to fair, adequate, and prompt compensation for land lost to mines. Activists also learn how to monitor the negative environmental effects of mining, particularly pollution to water bodies by cyanide (used to separate gold from rocks), which is shockingly frequent in Ghana. “Wacam has carried out investigations in water bodies in mining communities,” says Hannah Owusu-Koranteng, while riding in a van from Ghana’s second city Kumasi to the capital Accra, just one of the scores of trips she makes every year to train local activists. “Out of the 400 water bodies we tested, 250 were polluted. We presented the report to the Environmental Protection Agency and they are doing an investigation. It also helped inform a recent assessment in which the EPA rated the mining companies, and all the mining companies in Ghana were scored poor or unsatisfactory.

“This has all emerged from the communities, where activists identify pollution sources, and we contract researchers to analyze the water bodies and come out with findings we present to the government.”

Informed communities now know what to do if they find dead fish in rivers and streams: collect and preserve samples to verify the presence of cyanide contamination, contact the Environmental Protection Agency, and negotiate compensation from the company responsible for the spill. Local activists are also trained how to communicate with the media, in cases where government and company responses to such accidents are slow or non-existent.

Oxfam also supports the legal aid organization the Center for Public Interest Law, (CEPIL), which assists communities pressing their grievances through the courts. CEPIL’s work has helped several communities get compensation for cyanide spills, including a $250,000 development fund from mining company Goldfields Ghana, agreed in an out-of-court settlement for the community of Abekoase in 2007. CEPIL is also helping plaintiffs in Dumasi press for compensation from Bogoso goldmines for a cyanide spill. This case has been in and out of court since 2004, and further delaying tactics by the defendant are trying the patience of community members.

A leader emerges

It was in Dumasi where one of Wacam’s most energetic local activists emerged: Joanna Manu. Manu was one of the local farmers who learned about the cyanide spill in the nearby Aprepre Rriver in 2004, and went there immediately to collect dead fish and warn people not to touch or drink the water. She and her fellow activist Nii Anyetei pressed the case for compensation with the EPA and mining company.

Manu had also previously suffered the indignation of being arrested for farming her own lands, but successfully stood up in court and invoked the Minerals and Mining Act, pointing out to the judge that as she had received no compensation, the land did not belong to Bogoso . “I am farming that land still,” she told this writer in 2007.

In the meantime, Manu has pursued her studies, finishing high school in her mid-30s. She is now pursuing her ambition to become a member of Ghana’s parliament. She recently achieved a significant milestone on that road: she was elected to the District Assembly of the Western Region.

There’s a saying in the local Twi language in western Ghana, Adwem anu balofo tirmuI: knowledge is not only in the head of one person. “Wacam has taught me about the basic rights of people, their rights to own property, to information, to live as a human being. And that a leader has to listen to people, be humble before them, understand their issues, and that I have to have the courage, commitment, and confidence to represent them,” Manu says during a brief networking visit with other activists in the small city of Prestea, a gritty mining town near Dumasi.

For a community leader, especially a woman, to speak truth to power in Ghana, like many parts of Africa, is a challenge. Criticizing or challenging elders, or those in power, is risky – not only is it considered rude by many, it can lead to isolation. However in Ghana, there is a polite way to do this: one must seek permission to raise something publicly that might not be pleasant. This permission, called sebi, is a crucial way of working. “Wacam taught me how to do that,” Manu says.

In between villagers in her voting districts, Manu says she is setting her priorities for her work in the District Assembly. Chief among them is to ensure communities understand their rights in the face of industrial mining. “I know from my experience that when your land is taken from you, you will be jobless,” Manu says. “You will not get money to feed your family. I want the assembly to know about this so they will help people negotiate well, so they can get something for themselves.”

Anwiam means “in the sand” in the local Twi language. Residents enter the village by passing over a set of railroad tracks separating it from a housing development built for the AngloGold Ashanti mining company staff, behind chain link and barbed wire fences. Anwiam has no electricity and little clean water. “If you compare the company residences with Anwiam, it is like apartheid,” says Hannah Owuso-Koranteng, who works at the human rights and environmental organization Wacam. “The rail line divides them.”

AngloGold Ashanti was blasting in nearby mine pit, and draining water, without any advance warning to the community. Amo says they used to blow a whistle just before blasting, signaling a sudden evacuation. Then, two years ago she and others from Anwiam started attending training sessions with Wacam. These problems, Amo says, were “a violation of our rights to live in a clean environment.” She says they learned that the company should consult them about a blasting schedule, and warn them about water outflows—and pay fair compensation for damages.

Looking them in the eye

The training with Wacam was a real eye opener for Amo, who at first appears to be a very shy woman, concerned that she does not speak English well. But when she starts talking about the injustices she sees in her community, her face changes and she speaks rapidly and without much hesitation. “Now I can sit at the negotiation table and look the company representatives in the eye and tell them we think they should redress some of these issues, and that we should be compensated,” Amo says. “What they are doing is violating our rights, so they have to look at other ways of engaging us, so we can solve these things amicably.”

Stories of injustices like these, and local efforts to redress them, are becoming better known in Ghana thanks to a proliferation of grassroots activists trained by Wacam. Stories in the media abound: cyanide spills, homes damaged and destroyed by blasting, inadequate compensation, loss of farmlands and jobs and income, and involuntary relocation. “People are now questioning whether mining is a good development option for the country,” says Hannah Owusu-Koranteng. “And if we have to engage in mining, what are the methods we have to use?” She says questioning the role of mining in the economy used to be akin to treason, or a threat to national security. This started to change as Ghanaians have become more and more aware of the severe costs imposed by mining on local communities.

This has caused many to consider what mining is bringing to the country: Daniel Owusu-Koranteng points out that with such high prices for commodities like gold these days, mining is now bringing in about 40 percent of Ghana’s foreign exchange, more than exporting cocoa. However mining only contributes about six percent of Ghana’s GDP. “What accounts for this is high capital flight in the sector,” he says. The Minerals and Mining Act requires companies to pay between three and five percent of mineral revenue values, most pay three percent, a rate negotiated by some larger companies. Advocacy campaigns by Wacam and others are pushing this up to at least five percent.

The local activists trained by WACAM have played an important role in the national level debate about mining in Ghana. Each of them has had to take on new responsibilities and learn things about themselves in the process, as they work to improve their community and their country.

Philomena Addo, the subsistence farmer from Akatakyieso and recently elected village representative, is struggling to survive as she is taking on new leadership responsibilities. “We lost almost all our land to the mine. Now we have to go to other communities with land, and we are now share croppers,” she says outside her home. “There is just no land to cultivate here, the areas were all either destroyed or taken up by AngloGold for grazing cattle.”

Nevertheless, Addo says she has truth on her side, and is using her own personal transformation to seek a political solution to the problems in her community. “I used to be very timid,” she says “I would not discuss anything in public. Now I am more confident and I can speak at any level in public, at the community or national level.” She plans to push her agenda and serve her constituents: “It’s a privilege to win this confidence,” she says of her recent landslide victory at the polls.

Women, on every score, fall far behind.

No solution to poverty can endure without the full participation of women: They make up half the people on Earth.

To achieve that goal—to end poverty—we need to address discrimination and the uneven balance of power between men and women. At Oxfam, we support opportunities for women and girls to change the circumstances of their lives. We help them claim their rights, live free from violence, earn a decent income, get an education, become entrepreneurs, and make their voices heard. Guiding us is our belief in basic human rights, which includes the conviction that women—like men—have the capability to make a profound difference in the lives of their families, their communities, and their nations.

The innovative Saving for Change program is based on the mobilization of savings in small (20 to 25 members) groups. This approach differs from credit-based microfinance in that group members put their own money—sometimes as little as 25 cents a week—into a savings pool which is then loaned out to group members to cover emergency expenses or to start a small business. Saving for Change is now helping half a million people (primarily women, and a few men in Cambodia) with a safe and convenient place to save money, and as a source of small loans.

“This is a population that has been scarcely touched by microfinance institutions and banks,” says Jeff Ashe, the director of Oxfam America’s Community Finance program. Ashe helped introduce the Saving for Change model to Oxfam America in 2005 after carrying out an evaluation of similar programs in Nepal, India, and Zimbabwe.

With support from a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Oxfam is studying participation in Saving for Change and how this program is helping people provide some financial stability and improve their lives. Early results from studies in Mali are showing that participation in a Saving for Change group provides a valuable buffer against shock – if a household member gets sick, money is available to cover medical costs that might otherwise tip a very poor family into destitution.

“Knowing that their family can fall back on a loan from Saving for Change to deal with an emergency helps reduce stress,” says Janina Matuszeski, research coordinator for Oxfam America’s Community Finance Program. She says that this financial confidence “helps a woman get her head up and say, ‘what’s next?’ and take some control over her financial future.”

Saving for Change is currently operating in Mali, Senegal, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Cambodia. In total, the members in these groups are currently saving more than $9 million. The money these groups save (plus the interest on loans) is distributed to the group members every year when they need it the most, usually just before the harvest when families need food and have back-to-school expenses.

“Saving for Change groups are now starting to be used as platforms to introduce ecological agriculture and business and leadership training,” Ashe says. “We also want to build on initiatives that the women have taken on themselves such as the formation of girls groups and the purchase of grain to tide the members over the ‘hungry season.’”

Saving for Change is continuing to attract members, form new groups, and study the effects of the program on group members. “The objective is to develop a mass-scale and replicable model for building village economies at a modest cost per villager,” says Ashe. “We’ll study the outcomes, and then disseminate this model broadly.”

The difficult reality

The macroeconomics of the rising price of staples are complex, but its effect on the lives of three women interviewed by Oxfam America is simple: they feel it every day.

For María Antonia León, or “Toñita”, life has never been easy. She remembers a time when she earned $3 to $4 a day selling tamales, pastries and snacks from her food cart and was able to buy weekly staples to feed her family of five. With this income, she could get six pounds of beans, half a pound of cheese, half a pound of cream, four pounds of rice, eggs, a chicken, and other basics.

“Before, with $20, I was able to fill a shopping cart. Now I can’t… I spend $40 and it’s not enough. I can’t even fill a shopping basket because everything is so expensive. Beans are $2.50, and cooking oil for 15 days is $2. We just can’t manage. This current crisis is really tough,” says Toñita. She doesn’t know how she will find the money to buy shoes or clothes.

Alternatives that help

But Toñita has now found a way to provide her family with nourishing food: Inspired by Saving for Change, she has started a garden and is raising chickens for their eggs. Saving for Change is an Oxfam program that encourages women to use the capital generated through their savings groups to participate in projects that help them achieve a sustainable livelihood. One such project seeks to promote women’s production capacity, entrepreneurial, and self-reliance skills by helping them establish vegetable gardens.

With her garden, Toñita has a new means to feed her family and avoid paying the high prices at the market. The cucumbers, radishes, tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, and mustard greens she is growing are providing her family with the vitamins and proteins they weren’t getting before. And now she is teaching other women in her community how to do the same thing. The best part is she sells her extra produce at below market prices to her neighbors facing similar difficulties.

Health and other things pushed aside

Ana Elizabeth Barrera works at a market in the city of Santa Tecla. She cooks and sells prepared foods, and therefore intimately knows the issue of rising food prices. Ana Elizabeth has seen the price of staples climb steadily over the past five years, but notes an accelerated rise of 60 to 70 percent in the past year, most notably with oil, rice, beans and sugar.

“Six to eight months ago I would invest $100 for oil, rice and other basics, and today I am spending between $150-160 which buys the same amount. Consequently, I have to raise my prices, which means that sales have gone down,” says Ana Elizabeth. She has lost 40 percent of her clientele and has had to let go one of her two employees.

Iris Madrid finds herself in a vulnerable position after losing her job a few weeks ago. Although her income was modest, it was stable and allowed her to buy basic items for her home and support her three children. Now, without a salary and facing rising food costs, she depends on her mother who sells beauty products via catalog.

“If there is detergent, then there is no soap. Or if we have soap, then we have no detergent. If we have beans, then we won’t be eating cheese. If we have cheese, we won’t be eating beans… It hurts because when you have children and they ask you for something, you can’t give it to them,” explains Iris. There are days when all they eat are the mangos from the tree outside her house.

Saving for Change is a program that is growing every day. Since its launch in 2005, it has grown to more than 488,000 members in five countries. The hope is that it will continue to grow and reach people like Ana Elizabeth and Iris, like it has reached Toñita.

The film screening was part of an effort led by Oxfam and its partners in Chalatenango to help the women participants in Saving for Change groups to improve their entrepreneurial skills and ability to manage small businesses, as well as small-scale agricultural activities and ability to advocate for better policies to address major economic issues related to agriculture and food.

Other activities during the week included cultural acts, such as theater and folklore dances, organized by the women themselves. This is a remarkable accomplishment. For the first time, women felt empowered enough to organize community activities by themselves and for themselves. It’s an example of how teaching women to save and manage their own funds in a Saving for Change group also builds self-esteem.

High food prices globally, high impact on poor families

The documentary, titled Vamos al Grano, described the food price crisis in 2009. The women in the audience noted that the prices in Latin America have not dropped much since then. “The price of a 20 pound sack of beans has gone up to $30, $35; before, it was $10,” says Juana Morales, one of the participants. “This year [2010-2011] the prices have gone up more than ever.” She explains that the high prices are caused by heavy rainfall, which ruined the crops.

All the women who came to view the film are experiencing similar challenges in providing adequate nutrition to their families. The Saving for Change program is helping women to go beyond saving and small investments to improve their small-scale agricultural production through water management, improving soil through organic fertilizer and other means, and better seed selection. Oxfam’s partners in Chalatenango are training women leaders who are then passing on their knowledge to a wider group of Saving for Change members. Discussing the larger economic issues related to food production and supply will help the women to push for better policies at the local and national level that will help small-scale food producers like them to get the help they need to adequately feed their families, and improve their incomes.

Saving for Change ‘PLUS’

Oxfam is currently funding partner organizations CORDES, CCR, and ADEPROCCA to work with 575 women from Saving for Change groups in Chalatengango to improve their food production capacity, start small businesses, and learn to project their concerns and needs on to local and regional government.

“Saving for Change goes beyond just saving and lending money,” says Milagro Maravilla, Oxfam’s Program Coordinator for Saving for Change in Central America. “It’s a perfect way to start organizing women, and that’s what we’ve been doing alongside the savings activity for three years now. It was inspiring to see how they took the lead in organizing these activities, instead of just participating in events organized by national or local organizations. And now that there is such a force of empowered women, Oxfam is helping them with the necessary skills to take themselves a step ahead economically, and to advocate for their rights.”

"El Salvador is a country with one of the highest rates of femicide (the killing of women) in the world, according to the United Nation’s Population Fund,” said Carolina Castrillo, director of Oxfam America’s Central America, Mexico, and Caribbean regional office. In fact, over the past three years, the number of femicides in El Salvador has increased from 28 to 46 a month.

That is one reason why, on Nov. 25, legislators voted to approve (by a 75-9 margin) the Special Integral Law for a Life Free of Violence for Women. "The penalty for femicide will be between 30 and 50 years of imprisonment," said Mariela Pinto, chair of the Committee for Family, Women and Children’s Affairs in the legislative assembly. The new law also provides penalties—such as fines and jail sentences—for other crimes, such as pornography, psychological abuse, and negative or hateful messages.

Beyond penalization: prevention

An important and innovative aspect of this new law is that it addresses gender-based violence from a prevention perspective and broadens the definition beyond domestic violence. (Gender-based violence also can occur in public spaces, workplaces, etc.) Effective January 1, 2012, the law will be binding in the public sphere, such as ministries and the media. This means government institutions, such as the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Public Health, as well the Public Attorney’s office and the National Prosecutor’s office will be bound by law to do their part in the prevention of violence against women and children.

"Some institutions already are taking steps in this direction," says Mélida Guevara, program coordinator for Oxfam America’s gender program in the region. "For our Campaign for the Prevention of Gender Violence [an initiative of Oxfam America in collaboration with nine Salvadoran organizations], the Ministry of Education is a very important ally, in incorporating gender-based violence and its prevention within school curricula.”

“We also signed an agreement with the Sub-Ministry of Local Development,” she continues. “This coming year, we will bring theater and performance art, as well as training in basic gender concepts and the prevention of gender-based violence, to communities within which the ministry already works. But it takes much more coordination effort and work to change habits, roles, and beliefs. If we talk about a culture of prevention, we talk about changing the way we have been doing things for decades, even centuries. And that entails a long process, in which we all have to do our share.”

Two points of view included in one law

The new law is a product of two different proposals, one of which the female assembly members authored. These members participated in an intensive certificate course on gender-based violence, another initiative of the Campaign for the Prevention of Gender Violence. The Feminist Alliance, an alliance of several Salvadoran feminist organizations in El Salvador, authored the other proposal. The assemblywomen’s proposal stressed prevention; the proposal from the Feminist Alliance stressed penalization. The proposals complemented each other and came to make one multi-faceted law—a major victory for Salvadorans.

“This is a remarkable achievement,” said Guevara. “The Campaign’s certificate course for the assemblywomen, which resulted in the proposal, dates from 2008. It required constant work with the assemblywomen and their advisors from all the different parties. First, the women themselves had to be sensitized and find each other in a cause that goes beyond ideology. Then, as the course went on, we could see them become more and more committed, and start to advocate for gender equity as part of all the government bodies in which they take part.”

Over, the coming year, Oxfam America and its local partners will be among many civil society organizations working on a widespread education effort to teach Salvadorans, civil society, and government players about the law’s contents and the sort of conditions that need to be created to make effective implementation possible.

Celia Candiotti works as a security guard at the main municipal office of Huamanga, the capital of Ayacucho province in Peru. She’s tall and thin, and has a narrow face and severe eyes. She’s pleasant, but professional, as you would expect from a uniformed officer who commands respect.

Several years ago she was at work when she saw a 12-foot-high wall of water, mud, boulders, and cars flooding down one of the main streets in the city.

Cadiotti ran straight into the maelstrom to rescue people.

“You can’t fight your destiny,” Candiotti says, citing her training as a nurse and a firefighter. “I didn’t even think, I just responded -- I waded right in.” She rescued several injured people before she found a young girl, perhaps seven years old, trapped in a car. “She said to me, ‘I’m gonna die.’ I said ‘no’. But the water was coming in the window fast.”

That day the landslide killed about a dozen people, but thanks to Candiotti, that one young girl survived. The Ministry of Women gave Candiotti an award for heroism.

Candiotti noticed something then: people lined the street, horrified by the disaster, but did not help. She remembered this later when she went to a training session for the staff at the municipal office. The topic was how to understand and reduce racism and discrimination at their work, so they could ensure equal access to the services citizens need from the local government.

When it came to the pervasive racism in Ayacucho, Candiotti was much like the bystanders she saw on the street that day: concerned, but not sure what to do.

Learning to relate

The training session was organized by APRODEH, a human rights group Oxfam has been funding to work on ways to reduce racism and discrimination in Peru. The organization led efforts to help local governments pass new laws – ordinances – that require equal access to services, equal treatment by officials, for everyone, whatever their gender or ethnicity, whatever language they speak, however they dress, and whatever their age or appearance.

Addressing the racism and discrimination directed toward indigenous people, women, and handicapped people is an important component of Oxfam’s work to reduce barriers that keep people in poverty. And training for municipal workers, who play an essential role in helping citizens gain access to crucial services from local government, is one way APRODEH and Oxfam are working to changing the way people think about each other—and themselves--in Ayacucho.

For Candiotti, a woman who grew up on the coast in a family of Italian immigrants, understanding and confronting the racism and discrimination she could see in Ayacucho since she moved here eight years ago is a tremendous blessing. She says APRODEH’s training helped her and others understand that all people have basic rights. “People from the highlands are not any less than me, and we all have to learn to relate to each other. I could see the changes in the staff here,” she says, standing in her uniform near the front of the municipal hall. “We left the training calm and happy, a joy has taken over us.”

Now, Candiotti says the staff of the municipality behaves completely differently. Whereas before the indigenous staff would be reluctant to even speak Quechua, the local indigenous language, they are now happy to help indigenous people who come to the office no matter what language they can speak. “When people come and inquire in Quechua,” she says, “we all speak Quechua now, our attitude has really changed. We used to make fun of an elderly señora dressed in traditional clothes, but not anymore.”

When she’s at work, Candiotti wears a uniform slightly too large for her slim, athletic frame, with a cap pulled low over her forehead. She’s got a serious look about her, but when she describes the changes in the staff attitudes her eyes get a little wet.

Near the front entrance, she meets with some indigenous, Quechua speaking women under an arch leading in to the massive, Spanish colonial courtyard. Her warmth comes through as she answers questions, gives direction, and laughs at a joke.

Candiotti acknowledges that perhaps some destinies can change: “There’s always been discrimination,” she says near her post at the front entrance. “But little by little, this is changing.”

There’s a poster in the office of APRODEH in Ayacucho that depicts a group of highland indigenous people riding on a bus. Each passenger is regarding the others with suspicion: “I don’t like the look of that one,” one is thinking. Another thought bubble over the head of a fellow passenger says, “that cholo might rob me,” using a derogatory term for an indigenous person.

It’s a realistic scene, says Wilfredo Ardito, a 45-year-old attorney who APRODEH’s work on racism and discrimination in Ayacucho. He says Peru is an extremely ethnically diverse country, but years of racist attitudes towards the native people have resulted in the indigenous people themselves rejecting their own identity, refusing to speak their own languages, and turning their backs on their own culture. “They even use derogatory words against people like themselves,” Ardito says. “People lack self esteem, they respect white people more than themselves.” This is one of the key aspects of APRODEH’s training: helping people accept who they are, and to be proud of themselves. “Part of the process of eliminating racism is accepting your own face,” Ardito says.

APRODEH teaches staff at municipal government about discrimination and racism as a means to raise awareness and encouraging local communities to pass local ordinances to promote equality as part of a comprehensive effort to fight poverty in Ayacucho “We know it is more effective to have a local law,” Ardito says. “Most people don’t know about the national laws, not the police, not the judges.” One strategy that has proven effective is to work directly with elected regidoros, sort of like county commissioners, who represent specific constituencies in municipal affairs.

“Like an earthquake”

Socorro Arce, 45, is a regidora in Huamanga who helped organize a training session for all the female elected politicians in the department of Ayacucho – about 113 of them. This led to a network that is helping to promote women leaders, a space where Arce says “we can exchange ideas, and talk about human rights and gender, and we support new ideas like the ordinances, so we can reduce discrimination against people who speak Quechua, have a different religion, or women who are pregnant.”

Arce started fighting against injustice while in a religious high school, which she says was run poorly and discriminated against the darker skinned, poorer girls. “That’s why I became a leader -- the girls were really submissive, and I started to change that mentality,” she says. Arce was expelled twice, once for leading a strike against the school by students objecting to corporal punishment. “They would make us stand facing a wall with our hands on our heads for hours, it was like torture. I told them, ‘If you keep punishing us like this, we won’t go to class’,” she says she announced one day. “I was about 14 or 15 then.”

When APRODEH was looking for an ally to promote local ordinances, program officer Arturo Lopez decided to approach Arce because “she’s really accessible, I called her and she said ‘come on over,’ and she helped negotiate with the other women leaders.” He called the right person, it seems. Starting in her high school days, Arce says struggling against injustice was always high on her agenda. “In all the positions I have held as a leader, I have always spoken out against discrimination.”

Lopez and Arce are an unlikely pair. He is soft spoken, she is an aggressive talker, an avid networker. “I really like Arturo,” Arce says over a glass of fruit juice overlooking the central plaza in Huamanga. “He’s really calm. I’m more like an earthquake.”

Together they convened the women leaders, held a training session, and these women then went out and helped their communities pass four new ordinances in Ayacucho APRODEH says are fighting back against racism and discrimination at the local level.

To Wilfredo Ardito, the links between poverty and racism in Peru are obvious.

“The differences between life in the highlands, and in the jungles, and life in Lima are extreme,” he says in APRODEH’s office in Ayacucho. “Life expectancy in Lima is 80, and in the highlands it is 50. The campesinos [rural people] are poor, illiterate, malnourished, and people think this can’t change. So when budgets are approved, there is money for a [football] stadium in Lima instead of for reducing maternal mortality in the mountains…there is an attitude that campesinos can suffer, they can exist in this state of poverty, it is all right.”

After 10 years of economic growth in Peru, Ardito says wealth is concentrated in very few hands in the country, and the situation of the poorest people has not changed much.

APRODEH’s strategy is to encourage local leaders to promulgate local ordinances to address problems of racism and discrimination, and then train local municipal staff and officials to implement and enforce the new laws. The training sessions, Ardito says, are particularly effective. “People are skeptical at first, or they think we are going to talk about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement...then they realize it is about their experience, and that they share with others experiences of racism.” This goes for indigenous people, as well as for mestizo (mixed race) and white people who may have been brought up to behave in certain ways towards others who are different. The realization of this can be profound, and life changing.

Respect for basic rights

Oxfam America supports efforts to reduce racism and discrimination against indigenous people and women in Peru because these are the most impoverished people in the country. Helping indigenous people gain more respect for their basic rights will help them gain their fair share of quality education and health care. Eliminating discrimination will also help women gain access to better jobs and other services, and generally improve the situation for the country’s poorest people.

Building respect for indigenous people will also help communities value their own indigenous culture. This is essential because many indigenous groups have developed efficient, sustainable ways of living and working the land in some environmentally sensitive areas. The indigenous ways of using natural resources are being forgotten as people feel they must reject their indigenous identity in order to take advantage of all that modernity and western culture can offer. This is part of the reason why APRODEH and others are encouraging indigenous youth to speak their native languages and be proud of who they are—so they can live a decent life, take advantage of all that their government and society can offer them, without forcing them to assimilate into western culture and forget their past.

These municipal ordinances are helping Peru pull these problems out of the shadows,” Says Santiago Alfaro, Oxfam America’s program officer for indigenous rights in Peru. “Government employees can now see the negative effects of racism and discrimination on the quality of life in the country. APRODEH’s work in Ayacucho is echoing across the country, and there are now more and better legal tools available to help indigenous people remove barriers to public services.”