28 October 2009
Clubs Help Mayan Girls in Guatemala Stay in School
Washington — When Silvia Tum quit school at age 15, she already had more education than many of the girls in her Mayan village in the highlands of Guatemala.
The cost of school supplies, uniforms and bus fare to secondary schools is often a burden for Guatemala’s indigenous families, who make up almost half of the country’s population and overwhelmingly are poor farmers. If they send any of their children to secondary school, families generally choose from among their boys.
“My parents thought it wasn’t important for me as a girl,” said Tum, now 21. Typically, after ending school attendance, girls stay home, marry young and start having children of their own. That pattern helps keep Guatemala’s population among Latin America’s poorest and least educated, and it contributes to a high birth rate and high infant mortality.
But in 2004, at age 16, the path of Tum’s life changed: She was chosen to participate in a program aimed at expanding girls’ horizons and helping them stay in school. She was one of 16 older-adolescent girls hired and trained to lead village girls’ clubs.
The clubs meet at least once a week. Leaders seek to nurture confidence and self-esteem, and help girls take some control over their futures. The children’s mothers are also invited to participate. Subjects include human rights, reproductive health and family planning, business skills and public speaking. Some clubs provide academic tutoring — a big need in communities where families speak a Mayan language at home while the schools teach in Spanish.
The goal is to get girls to delay marriage and child bearing, and to consider new opportunities involving school and then work. The clubs offer girls a safe place to play sports, like soccer, and to learn handicrafts, like traditional-clothing construction. The girls’ families appreciate the colorful scarves and sweaters club members make, which their parents can wear or sell for income.
“I saw in my own group that many of the girls stayed in school,” Tum said. “The mothers had the opportunity to gather and to change their attitudes,” which in traditional Mayan communities typically reflect a belief that older girls should stay home and devote themselves to domestic work. The mothers “became more open to communicating with their daughters” about delaying marriage and working outside the home, Tum said.
After joining the program, Tum enrolled in evening classes and got her high school diploma. She is now one of only a small number of indigenous students in Guatemala attending a university, where she studies social work.
The program of girls’ clubs is called Abriendo Oportunidades (Opening Opportunities). It was established by the Population Council, a nonprofit group based in New York, in partnership with Mayan community groups in Guatemala.
“We don’t come in as a foreign organization trying to impose something,” said the council’s Jennifer Catino. “We work with groups that are already there, and communities and families need to be on board.”
Tum participated in the program’s initial two-year pilot phase. Deemed a success, the program has been steadily expanded and in 2009 involves 80 girl leaders working with 2,500 younger girls in 40 rural communities. The girl leaders sign up for a year, are attached to a local nonprofit organization, and receive a stipend. Virtually all of them have returned to school — often evening classes — becoming role models for the younger girls.
“Adolescence is really the key time,” said Kathy Hall, an official with the United Nations Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that mobilizes support for the U.N.’s humanitarian work and has contributed to the costs of the Guatemala program. “If you don’t get [girls] then, they stop their education and it’s really hard to break the cycle of poverty.”
Development agencies have increasingly concluded that one of the most effective ways of improving living standards in poor countries is by raising the education level and status of women. But experts say that, especially in rural areas, the relative powerlessness of girls and women and their isolation inside their homes has kept them from participating in rural development programs.
The Population Council’s Catino said her group decided to start a program in Guatemala after determining that “most conventional programs directed to young people are actually not reaching the populations that need them the most: indigenous girls.”
The biggest donors to the program’s roughly half million dollar annual budget are the Nike Foundation and the United Nations Population Fund. Local government agencies in Guatemala also help to run the program, Catino said.
The program is being expanded into more indigenous communities. Organizers say most of the girls who have gone through it are staying involved though a national rural girls’ network. The Population Council’s medium-term strategy, Catino said, is to hand the program over to local organizations that could sustain it without the council.
