Capacity building of rural women in three municipalities in the department of Estelí to exercise their right to live free from violence and with autonomy in their livelihoods.
Directly involved are 430 women, indirectly about 10.320 people (5.347 female and 4.973 male) from their families and communities.
The municipalities served by the project in the department of Estelí are located in the Dry Corridor where climate variability has been affecting production yields, which in recent years have suffered considerable damage and loss of crops due to the increasingly variable and critical whether conditions. The lack of food in families has generated feelings of hopelessness and forced young women and men to migrate from the countryside to the city in search of employment and income. The main economic activities in the project communities is farming for self-consumption, mainly basic grains (maize, beans and sorghum) and livestock (large and small species) on a small scale. Socially, there is a growing structural violence that, for women, translates into gender-based violence (GBV), increasing domestic violence, femicide rates and teenage pregnancy. FEM has carried out participatory research that show the problems experienced by rural women, such as the specific impact of climate change on women's lives, the influence of agrarian history on women's present and the situation of soil and water in the five communities. This project has been planned directly with the target group of rural women. FEM's relationship with the target population stems from the fact that rural women are part of its organisational fabric in the communities. They participate in the different organisational structures mentioned above, especially in this project with the cooperatives.
Fundación entre Mujeres (FEM) has been working for gender equality since 1995. A core area of FEM is the educational program, which covers a wide spectrum from literacy training to tutoring for schoolgirls to scholarships for university studies or vocational training. Another focus is strengthening women's rights to a life without violence.