Bóthar women around the world
In many of the countries where Bóthar works, women and girls find few opportunities for education and paying jobs. They have far less control over their family income and resources than their brothers, fathers and husbands. School, a career and independence seem far out of their reach.
These inequities create quite a challenge, because for even a simple development project to be successful, it must have a full and equal participation, support and investment of all members of the community
Bóthar’s gender equality initiative is enormously successful. Bóthar does this by directly addressing the disparities between men and women in accessing resources and sharing decision-making power and workloads. All project participants take part in gender equity training, which helps them analyse the dynamics in their own community and take steps to make sure everyone is included.
All over the world, women who previously had little money, self-esteem and hope are bringing boundless energy, ideas, opportunities and most of all, change to their families and their communities. Here are just a few of the women who have benefited from taking part in Bóthar livestock projects around the world.
Saditra Guragain - Nepal:
For most of her life, neighbours and relatives considered Saditra Guragain of Nepal a burden and a curse. Called a bad omen because her mother died shortly after she was born, Guragain spent her childhood cooking, cleaning and herding cattle. Although she was a clever child, her father and brother refused to send her to school, saying that educating a girl was a waste of time and money. She eventually enrolled in a local school where her progress was rapid, but when she reached the age of 15 her brother was unwilling to continue paying for her education, and married her off to a man from a neighbouring village.
By the age of 21, Guragain had three children. She and her husband struggled to make ends meet, eventually moving in with a neighbour, for whom Guragain did housework to pay rent. The family was able to scrape together a meagre living from a tiny income Guragain’s husband made pulling a rickshaw. For Guragain, the low point came when her son came to her crying for milk, which he had seen the neighbour’s child drinking. She and her husband gave their son rice water mixed with sugar and told him it was milk. ‘That night my husband and I couldn’t sleep at all’, she remembers. ‘We wished we were dead instead’.
Guragain heard about the programme supported by Bóthar and its project partners, Heifer International, that supported women with training, helped them form a small saving fund, and eventually gave them a water buffalo. Guragain's husband initially resisted the idea, saying they were too poor to contribute to the group fund, but Guragain persisted, finally convincing a group of 15 desperately poor women like her to form the Shrijanshil Krishi Mahila Bachat Samuha, or Creative Women Savings Group.
Each member contributed 11 Nepalese Rupees monthly towards the group fund. Soon after setting up the group each member of the group received a buffalo. ‘The buffalo was a boon that transformed my life’, says Guragain. With the income from the surplus milk, the group members saved money towards passing on the gift, and eventually increased their savings to 100 Nepalese Rupees. Required to pass on the gift within three years, Guragain completed the pass-on in just 11 months. ‘I could not see my suffering neighbour wait any longer for the gift’, she said.
Today, the child no one encouraged is a leader in her village. Under her guidance the group undertook a variety of civic improvement projects to improve the roads into the village, build a public pit toilet and mediate conflicts and disputes.
However, perhaps Guragain’s most remarkable accomplishment has been to build a school on public land for Mushar children, who are some of the poorest in the area and several handicapped by caste discrimination. It is a small school, but it already has a good reputation, and Guragain is determined that no one will be left behind.
Dile Prekpalaj – Kosovo:
For Dile Prekpalaj of Kosova, generosity was something she inherited from her family. She recalls her grandmother telling her, ‘If you do something bad, it will come back to you seven times worse, but if you do well it will be rewarded by God’’. Prekpalaj, who was one of the first women from her village to attend school, was first moved to help the people of her community in 1999, when Serbian forces began attacking the Albanian families in the nearby village of Krusha e Vogel. The Serbians took the men to be killed, and left the women and children on the outskirts of the village.
‘When the Serbian police left’, Prekpalaj said,’ we went and took the children to our homes. As we were leaving we could hear the gun shots, and everyone knew what they were.’
Prekpalaj organised her village to come to the assistance of the refugees, and travelled with them from Kosova to Albania. When the Serbian forces were defeated, Prekpalaj and the refuges returned to their village in Kosova. For the women of Krusha e Vogel, where there had once been a thriving community, there was now utter destruction. Their houses had been burned and their animals slaughtered. For those whose husbands had been killed, they faced the task of rebuilding their lives alone.
Prekpalaj approached the women of Krusha e Vogel about forming a farmers association to help them support themselves again. The programme which began as a simple livestock project soon became a more focused effort to restore not only the livelihoods of the war widows but also their communities.
The first objective of the project was to help reduce the social isolation of the widows by connecting them through a common project, a dairy project. As Prekpalaj helped the women launch their micro-enterprise, collecting milk from their cows and finding a production plant, the group began to come together. The women started to open up to each other, they shared their thoughts, their worries and their ideas for the future.
Felicita Ochoa – Honduras
In the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, which devastated much of Central America in 1998, Felicita Ochoa and the other women in Las Camelias, Honduras banded together to rebuild their lives. Together with Bóthar and Heifer International they formed the Las Dinamicas pig-raising project in 2000. After some time spent on being trained in cattle and pig management, the group received 35 female and three male pigs.
Due to the demand in the local market for pigs, the project dramatically improved each family’s income. Each pig gives birth to approximately 8 piglets, twice a year, allowing each family to sell 16 pigs annually. Families have also retained a few pigs for breeding which has further increased production.
So far the income from the sale of pigs has been used to help families repair and improve their homes, their farming plots and to make handicrafts to sell at the local market.
Membership continues to grow in the project and new participants – many of them women – have received pigs as pass-ons from Felicita Ochoa and other original members of the group. The group also passed on pigs to women’s groups in neighbouring communities.
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