Savannette

We arrive in the community of Savanette after a five hour drive through the mountains. I meet with a group of women leaders who have been receiving residential and community based training from ITECA on human rights, political participation and creating and managing small businesses at a community level. They also receive support with small projects to increase their income.

In rural areas women are rarely included in decision making and have problems making their needs and aspirations heard. The women told me how important it is for them to improve conditions in the communities where they live.

Due to a lack of basic services and opportunities to make enough money for families to survive, many of the young women are forced to leave for the city to look for work so that they can send money home. Physical and sexual violence against women is common, especially in the slums of Port au Prince and other large urban areas. In the cities, poor women are more likely to be attacked and less likely to have access to health services or justice and protection from the State.

If given the choice, many of the women forced to leave their rural homes to find work in the cities would have stayed with their families or gone only if they had the minimum resources needed to stay safe while finding work and/or getting started on their studies. The project is making it possible for women to stay with their communities and to make informed choices about moving to the city.

The women say that the project has helped them to organise their production so that they can make better profits in the local market. By working in small cooperatives they are able to buy more seeds and animals than they would be able to on their own. They can also take turns to take produce to the market and by working together they can demand a better price from the ‘middlemen’ who buy locally to sell on in Port au Prince.

The women’s group also said that whilst at the moment the government was not delivering essential services, they understood that their campaigns had to be long term so that their children and grandchildren would have a better life than the one they are enduring at the moment.