How can education meet women's needs?

We intend to assist women and girls who are in a vulnerable situation in the city of Arara, located in the state of Paraiba, and other small towns around, in the semi-arid region of northeastern Brazil. This project comes up from the necessity of discussing gender inequality, gender-based violence and the consequences of this scenario reflected in the barriers to access and the permanence of these people to academic space.

Our team aims to favor a social supportive network (Health, Education and Legal Advice) that stands up for them in their academic careers. Through the field research, we identified what makes women's academic progression impossible are factors of the structural field and assistance. 

The women we interviewed reported their demand of this collaborative network in their speech that acts in an encouraging way during their academic career to achieve their professional success by having quality learning provided.

School dropout due to domestic issues:

• Teenage pregnancy

• Housework

• Taking care of the kids

• Domestic violence

• Financial dependence

• Inaccessibility to labor market 

• Underemployment

• Bring inspiration in empowered women historically ignored;

• Promote financial education for personal emancipation and entrepreneurism inside their own cities;

• Establishing partnership with the private sector, following the model: “Donate as much as you can” in order to raise funds to subside the project;

• Provide a space with humanized and friendly assistance to the girls, womens and their children;

• Health assistance for the mothers and their children;

• Legal Advice; 

• A school space within their own school that serves their children.
  

Initially, girls and women from the community of Arara, Paraiba, focused on an extension to other places that presents similar demands. The democratic educacional access will be the vehicle of personal and financial emancipation of the participants, allowing their personal growth and, as a consequence, the female entrepreneurial leading role in their local community.

This issue shows that the main cause of school dropout is the absence of a space that gives the support and provides the subsistence to the main demands implied to the female subject. Due to the dimension selected aims to reduce the barriers that prevent the access of quality learning, we believe that our solution will allow the academic progress of the participants, since we will be assisting their needs besides only free schooling provision.

Most educational projects do not fully address women's needs. In this project, in addition to meeting the academic needs of girls and women, our central objective is to repair gender inequalities, providing students a supportive network focused on overcoming inequalities that trigger inaccessibility to school access.

3 women

As three young women who have been studying the areas of education and projects development for over a year, we have this dream of  changing the sexist context by which we, as society, are exposed. For this purpose, we realized the powerful need to provide women and girls holistic assistance to overcome the main difficulties in accessing good education and succeeding professionally, reaching their self-reliance.

Our organization will be inspired in cooperative models and will count on the free and democratic collaboration of private companies. It will be a self-runned organization by the members of this team.

Partner financial institutions interested in capacitated people, which the women and girls could contribute with their workforce later in order to succeed in their career.

We are applying to the prize because the social role of our project meets the objective of this prize which aims at promoting equity in the access to education for women and girls.

We will use The GM Prize to reach our goals with this project.