By Sr Maria Luciene Neide, Brazil (Province of Southeast Latin America)
Since the Congregation arrived in Juazeiro de Bahia in 2018, we have developed several projects in the area, including a rural women’s economic empowerment project called Mujer Levántate y Camina! (“Woman, Stand up and Walk”) which was established three years ago.
Juazeiro de Bahia is a city in the rural district of Massaroca, Brazil. This region has a semi-arid climate, and one of the biggest challenges faced by people living here is preserving and recovering the ‘Caatinga’ (a semi-arid tropical shrubland or thorn forest) by capturing rainwater. This and the struggle to keep and defend the land and their local traditional customs, which are key to how they coexistence with this semi-arid land.
Most of the families raise goats, sheep, or chickens or grow vegetables for themselves or to sell – others survive from what cash-in-hand work they can find.
With the support of Good Shepherd International Foundation Latin America, we offer direct support to 18 women from rural communities to develop new skills, increase food production, generate income, strengthen community organizations, and improve the quality of life for them and their families.
Our project includes training workshops on human rights, self-esteem, leadership, care for the environment, and job skills development, as well as skills in selling their products.
The women who take part in the project are mothers, community leaders, or involved in the running of community associations and cooperatives. These women are critical to the local economy – in their struggles, they assume strategic roles to sustain rural life.
As this mission has developed, it has been remarkable to witness how women’s empowerment is a core area of intervention for our mission, not just from an economic and business point of view but for the attention given to the individual, family, and community development aspects.
One of the women participants, Ana Lucia, spoke about how “In the past, the Church was just the priest, but now the sisters are here, we see that it is much more than that: it is a Church that walks alongside women and helps them progress.”
Our goal is to support these women to become more self-sufficient to enable them to avoid or escape various types of violence or to leave their hometowns in search of work where they might fall prey to human trafficking or other harm.
Using a rights-based framework we work closely with the women and with projects that clearly adopt an approach to integral ecology. In the video, the women at the project pray with song around the raw materials to be used for the construction of a water filter system.
The women involved in the project talk about how they now feel empowered to make decisions and improve their personal, family, and community lives.
Some of the women have developed small businesses, including keeping chickens for eggs, cultivating gardens to grow vegetables for their use and for sale, and rearing sheep and goats on a small scale.
In their struggle to survive, these women give huge importance to adopting sustainable environmental management practices based on agro-ecological principles, income generation, productive inclusion, strengthening of local organizations, strengthening of leadership, and the empowerment of all women.
The way these women continue to respond to difficult situations encourages other women and strengthens the potential of women farmers.
Together, we have been able to highlight the leading role women can play in this region, and we remain committed in our struggle to guarantee the survival of the families and communities of this land.
