The Universitat de València has set up, by means of the cooperation programme ‘0'7 Committee A Ship of Solidarity’, a project in Bogotá, Colombia, for the purpose improving the quality of life of more than a hundred women, member of the community organisation Mesa HUNZAHUA, subjected to a double discrimination: because of her women condition and because of his work of social and cultural character.
The project, titled ‘Mujeres de organizaciones populares y sus experiencias de Economía social y solidaria con perspectiva de género’ (‘Women in popular organisations and their experiencies of Social and Solidarty Economy with a gender perspective’), belongs to the IV Call for Development Cooperation Projects, led by the Office of the Vice-Principal for International Relations and Cooperation, and managed by the General Foundation of the Universitat de València. This initiative is led by Trinidad Quixa, administrative staff of the University Extension Service of the Universitat, and Mauricio Pinto, member of the association Entre Iguales Valencia, who work on this project with the local NGO in Bogotá Enda América Latina - Mesa HUNZAHUA.
Mesa HUNZAHUA works in the district (‘locality’, according to the Colombian territorial organisation) of Suba, to which the neighbourhood Ciudad Hunza belongs, and it gathers six groups of women associated in the following groups: Colectivo de Mujeres Recicladoras Loma Verde, Grupo de Mujeres de la Huerta Comunitaria, Jardín Infantil Ciudad Hunza, Casa Cultural Corpohunza, Grupo de Jóvenes de Cerro Nonceta Teatro y Grupo de Mujeres Artesanas. The commitment of Mesa HUNZAHUA with all this groups, integrated by 108 women and 30 men, is to ‘encourage participation, reinforce the social network, act as a mediator in conflicts with justice criteria, construct bonds of solidarity, recognise the otherness, the diversity and equity, and to give a sense of sustainability to community life in the area’ points out Mauricio Pinto.
In this field where the project of the Universitat de València has started a series of actions that can be grouped together in two phases: one of strengthening of women capacities and another one of work in the field.
Through Social and Solidarity Economy, it tries to improve the quality of life of women in popular neighbourhoods. ‘The work on Social and Solidarity Economy is for women an option of life, a future project and a dream that they want to fulfil’, says Pinto. Activities, such as recycling, the community vegetable garden, the kindergarten, the artisanial production and other cultural community activities with initiatives that they manage by themselves and that need to optimize and to make it profitable. ‘They need to form themselves and to train themselves to improve their productivity and compete in the market with a product of better quality’, affirms Mauricio Pinto.
This Social Economy has to be developed from a gender perspective by the recognition of them being women ‘stigmatised and discriminated by authorities and societies’, he continues. In fact, this women live in extreme poverty and their conditions of overcrowding in extremely precarious settlements, where the family nucleus and the extended family cohabitate. As the responsible of the association Entre Iguals explains, this context favours the occurrence of sexual abuses and violations. ‘The chain of violence is expanding and the major victims are women, boys and girls that live in fear of the violent action of fathers, husbands, older brothers, uncles or godfathers’ he adds.
This women confront physic, psychological and sexual violence from their partners, a violence that they themselves consider ‘natural’. At the same time, ‘the fear produces a conclusive silence: women do not recognise themselves in public as victims and replicators of violence; and there are no data of violence in the general population and less against women and girls’, points out Mauricio Pinto.
In order to avoid this situation, it is needed to encourage and accompany women of the Mesa HUNZAHUA in the development of their Social Economy projects, for what they need to manage in an autonomous way their revolving founds, as well as to identify and implement alternative credit and saving system. ‘What it seeks is to try to sound out several alternative systems of obtaining financial capital to support and to increase the visibility and sustainability of the economic initiatives of this women, this is to say, to allow them to access to soft and cheep financial systems, with which the interests do not stifle women economic processes’, he indicates.
Another investment is the access to alternative credit and saving systems as economic exercises that women manage in an autonomous way. With this financial option, ‘the profits of credits would remain in the same group, with guarantees supported by the members of the Mesa; there would have to be flexible and opportune credits that incentive individual and collective savings’, he thinks.
Actions of the project
Among the actions to be taken by the project of the Universitat de València, it is included the exchange of knowledge with women organisations of other districts in Bogotá and of the whole Colombian territory to provide the formation and the information and, therefore, the empowerment of women of Ciudad Huanza; the inclusion of suggestions in the plans of public policies of the Mayor’s Office of Suba and in the programmes of Bogotá against violence against women; and, more specifically, to boost recycling in the locality through the activity of the group Colectivo de Mujeres Recicladoras Loma Verde, in order to recognise recycling as a formal occupation inside the community management of the maintenance of the city service.
The Programme ‘0'7 Committee A Ship of Solidarity’
The Programme ‘0,7 Committee A Ship of Solidarity’, called by the Office of the Vice-Principal for Internationalisation and Cooperation of the Universitat de València, is managed by the 0.7 Committee, created in 1995 with the aim of establishing the general action lines of cooperation to development of the Universitat de València; distributing the 0.7 budget -obtained from the 0.7% of the Universitat budget, as well as with a volunteer basis of the 0.7% of the salaries of its staff and university fees of students- among the different cooperation programmes; controlling and supervising this budget; and preparing and solving calls for cooperation projects.
Last update: 7 de march de 2016 09:02.
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