- The campaign entitled “#RuralWomen, women with rights” seeks to give visibility to women’s achievements and challenges towards full autonomy in rural Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)
BBVA Microfinance Foundation (BBVAMF), a nonprofit organization present in five Latin American countries, joins the #RuralWomen, women with rights campaign.
The Foundation will contribute in giving visibility to gender gap issues faced by rural, indigenous and Afro-descendant women in the LAC region.
Similary, the Foundation will publish projects and success stories that show the need of working towards rural women’s autonomy.
By joining the campaign, BBVAMF becomes a new partner that supports the campaign’s core message for the whole region: sustainable rural development is only possible if equality between men and women is achieved.
Rural women are essential to achieve the SDG
The #RuralWomen, women with rights campaign is an initiative based on collaborative work that aims to create synergies, build networks and spread knowledge and positive experiences to drive rural women’s full autonomy.
The “#RuralWomen, women with rights” is organized by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), UN Women, the Central American Agricultural Council, Mercosur’s Special Meeting on Family Farming, Brazil’s Special Secretariat on Agrarian Development and Uruguay’s Directorate General for Rural Development.
“Gender equality is essential to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to construct a development model that would leave no one behind. Rural women are particularly important, given that eight out of 10 indicators in the SDG are closely linked to what is happening in rural communities”, explained Claudia Brito Bruno, Gender Official for FAO.
A decade working with low-income entrepreneurs
For more than ten years, BBVAMF works with vulnerable people that develop productive activities who need financial and technical support to improve their lives.
“The Foundation’s outcomes show that serving low-income entrepreneurs with adequate financial products and services over time is key to produce economic and social development, at the same time mitigating poverty and its consequences”, claimed Laura Fernández Lord, head of Women Empowerment in the BBVA Microfinance Foundation.
The Foundation works with its proprietary methodology, Productive Finance, in Chile, Colombia, Peru, the Dominican Republic and Panama through its six microfinance institutions. This model places people at the heart of all its activities, supporting them with financial products and services, technical advice and training for their development. The Foundation also boosts the sector’s transformation, another strategic point.
Women are a significant proportion of the 5 million plus entrepreneurs that the Foundation has served in the past ten years (it is currently serving more than 2 million, most of them women).
In the case of rural women who are engaged in agriculture, BBVAMF has accepted the challenge of appropriately serving them, reaching out to them within their communities and attending to their needs with the help of microfinance officers who are familiar with farming production.
“These rural women are proof that with their work, one chance is enough for them to contribute not only to progress, but also to the world around them. Sustainable development is indispensable for them, as it is to transform the planet and comply with the 2030 Agenda”, assured Fernández Lord.
Click on the videos below to discover more about the Foundation’s work and to see testimonies of women who were able to progress with the institution’s support:
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