Mudderakka, an elected woman representative to her local village council from Karnataka, India, shares her story of how The Hunger Project empowered her to bring water to her village. The speech is from The Hunger Project's annual fundraising gala in October 2000 in New York, NY.
Examples of how $10,000 per year invested through the Unleashed Women Leaders Initiative is used
• 30 rural elected local government women leaders trained to set new agenda's in their villages, bring water and sanitation, stand up to corruption, read budgets, join and work through THP Federations with other women leaders to create systemic political change through the Women's Leadership Workshop and follow up trainings over the 5 years of their term @ $300 per participant equals $10,000. Each woman impacts more than 400 people.
• 30 local rural women trained in legal rights that most affect women, including property rights, domestic violence, and inheritance law through the Barefoot Woman Lawyers @ $300 participant. These women move on foot between villages, setting up open sessions where they advise women on their rights, and help fight their battles.
• 40 women trained to run intensive and transformative workshops empowering communities with accurate information about the causes of AIDS and exploring the social taboos, attitudes and gender behaviours that fuel the epidemic through HIV/AIDS and Gender Inequality Animators training @ $250 per participant
• Microfinance for 160 women @$60 per average loan. Women are trained in financial literacy and income generation skills as part of their loan participation
• 200 women are trained as leaders to run the Vision, Commitment and Action workshop in their villages, run campaigns to educate girls, halt early marriages, and create income opportunities for rural poor through the Animators Training@ $50 per participant
The Unleashed Women Leaders Initiative
We are excited to launch The Unleashed Women Leaders Initiative, and invite your partnership.
The Unleashed Women Leaders Initiative has been created to secure long-term, sustainable funding for our work with resource poor, uneducated rural women to help them succeed in ending hunger in their communities.
The Hunger Project is the foremost agency developing women's leadership to end hunger in the world, including: empowering women and local democracy in India; building a movement of women leaders in Bangladesh; strengthening the capacity of indigenous leaders in Latin America; and creating and establishing women owned and run local banks in Africa.
We mean it when we say that developing the leadership of women is the key to ending hunger
Why are women the key to ending hunger?
Women bear almost all responsibility for meeting basic needs of the family, yet are systematically denied the resources, information and freedom of action they need to fulfill this responsibility.
The vast majority of the world's poor are women. Two-thirds of the world's illiterates are female. Of the millions of school age children not in school, the majority are girls. And today, HIV/AIDS is rapidly becoming a woman's disease.
Studies show that when women are supported and empowered, all of society benefits.
The Unleashed Women's Leaders Initiative focuses on women.
In The Hunger Project we have found that through empowering women:
- • Families are healthier
- • More children go to school and girls stay in school
- • Child marriages are stopped
- • Corruption is brought into the light and defeated
- • Villagers are mobilised to deal with climate change
- • Federations and networks are formed and laws are changed
- • Agricultural productivity improves and incomes increase
- • Crimes against women diminish as rapists and other perpetrators of violence are punished
- • Gender attitudes and behaviours that fuel the spread of HIV AIDS are confronted and transformed
In short, communities become more resilient.
Programs with far reaching leverage
The Hunger Project has trained and supported:
- 75,000 elected women village leaders in India;
- 50,000 women volunteer "animators"1 in Bangladesh;
- 3,000 women "barefoot lawyers" in Bangladesh and across our epicentres in Africa;
- 36,000 women utilising financial services at African epicentre banks per year; and
- Networks of thousands of indigenous women leaders in Latin America.
How we can seize a unique moment in history
Training women leaders — taking women on the journey from subjugation to unleashed leadership — is intensive, but the payoff is extraordinary.
When The Hunger Project trains women leaders, we walk the path with them for approximately five years — ensuring that they are able to translate their vision into concrete results for their village.
We ask that you walk this path with them too.
The difference you will make
Your financial investment in The Unleashed Women Leaders Initiative will be life changing for women, men, boys and girls who live in the grinding reality of chronic hunger and who have until now seen no way out.
Empowering women is the way out.
As investors in The Unleashed Women Leaders Initiative you will receive a report twice a year outlining what has been achieved. We will also be holding special evenings throughout the year updating members on the accomplishments and future directions. You will also be able to visit the work on the ground and see this transformation first hand.
Your money will create generations of opportunity and health for children who are yet to be born.