Fight Poverty: Educate Women in Panama

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.

We are starting March at Fundacion Calicanto with good news to share with you all. Our first CAPTA PANAMA group finished the training!

One of the final classes, the “Healthy Family Relationship Workshop”, is an essential component for women’s commitment to help themselves and include all the family members in their transformation, connecting one another in a safe and respectful way. This workshop builds stronger family relationships, getting family members give the women all the support needed in their vocational training. We believe the success begins from inside out.

In other hand, our CAPTA team finished the first step of the study in Portobelo. In the introductory phase, they visited five communities: Puerto Lindo, San Felipe, Maria Chiquita, Cacique and Isla Grande. They presented the project and received the feedback from 98 women that were accompanied by community leaders, taking into special consideration their needs and issues. These communities are affected by high rates of school dropouts and unemployment. We are committed to the idea that providing them with this training is a way of preventing social exclusion, low incomes and continuing poverty.

Furthermore, we completed the first phase of the project “La voz de las niñas del Centro de las Americas”, the TIC-as Central America booth camp that was led by the cooperative Sulá Batsú with the support of Google.org. This part of the project was carried out from January 24 to February 5, with the participation of 90 girls. This training gave them the opportunity to amplify knowledge in technology and female empowerment. Now we are preparing the logistics for the second phase in which we are going to benefit more than 30 mothers of the girls that participated in this program. We will be sharing news with you about how this program can make a difference in the communities.

One more time, we want to THANK YOU for always stay tuned and supporting us. Training is a tool, a strategy that intends to impact and transform every woman by raising awareness and encouraging skills development.

Links:

• Fundacion Calicanto

Happy new year to all of our friends, donors and supporters of Fundación Calicanto! The new year has started in the best way possible: THE FIRST CAPTA COURSE STARTED, WITH 25 WOMEN SELECTED!

We have already planned all of the courses we are going to implement across this year in Panama City and we now know that we have the capacity to spread our knowledge across many different modules (we implement 30 modules per course).

CAPTA hopes to have the 25 women from underprivileged backgrounds graduate from the first course of the year, and then hopes to benefit a further 140 women or more in Panama City in other courses.

In our previous report, we mentioned the study we have initiated with the community of Portobelo. During the following three months we will be conducting focus groups and organizing meetings with different organizations to understand the possibility of expanding our CAPTA program in Portobelo. A lot of economic support will be needed to help us get off to a flying start with this new challenge, along with the additional help of the communities of Portobelo, Panama City and our faithful local and international donors like you.

This year we are also implementing a TIC-as bootcamp in Chitré, Los Santos and Chame, aiming to empower 90 girls and their mothers to learn about technology. This project has already been rolled out across Central America and now we have the possibility to implement it in Panama in collaboration with Sulá Batsú and Google Central America. In our next report you will learn about the results of this project.

Finally, we want to say thank you for being on the other side of this article, reading these words, and acting against the inequalities that exist in the world today.

We are also attaching pictures to this article of our activities. Please let us know if you have any questions at mercadeo@fundacioncalicanto.org.

Links:

• http://www.fundacioncalicanto.org