Colombia's Familias en Acción (Families in Action) program is banking on the strength of the family. Set up in 2001 with US$150 million in World Bank funding, the project has benefited about 347,000 families from 627 municipalities - reaching some 800,000 people. Familias en Acción targets two key obstacles preventing people from lifting themselves out of poverty - education and nutrition. These stories highlight the value of the project to Colombia's poor.
SAMACÁ, August 29, 2005 — Abandoned by her husband and almost entirely uneducated - she attended school for only one year - María Elisa Gil lives mostly on hope. With no employment options beyond her job sorting discarded paper and glass at a recycling center, she earns a sub-minimum wage salary of 10,000 pesos (US$4) a day. Gil says her boss wanted to promote her to an accounting job, but she lacked the schooling necessary to perform even elementary bookkeeping tasks. Since the breakup of her marriage three years ago, Gil and her four children have lived in a single room in her brother's house on the outskirts of a small town, Samacá, about 160 kms north of Bogotá. She understands education offers her children their only chance to escape the cycle of poverty. "I aspire for my children to do what I couldn't," Gil says. " I would like them to be able to go to university. I tell them 'Study, study, study,'" she says. "I want them to say, 'My mother fought for me to get ahead in life.'" The odds are against most families like Gil's. Fully one-half the Colombian children of their age and social status are forced out of school and into the work force. However funding from the World Bank's Familias en Acción program is offering the Gil children another option. Six times a year, the family receives 229,000 pesos (about US$92). It includes 56,000 pesos each for María Margarita, 15, and Carlos David, 14; 28,000 for Laddy Elizabeth, 11; and 93,000 for Edwin Leonardo, three. For the three older children, the money covers the costs of school uniforms, textbooks, school supplies, and snacks to sustain them during the school day – all expenses Gil would have no way of paying on her own. The funding for her youngest child helps pay for healthy nutrition, that's critical to his being ready to enter school. It's provided on the condition that Gil takes him for regular visits to a health clinic. The money from the Familias en Acción program does not solve all the Gil family's problems. But the subsidies do lower the single biggest stumbling block that stands in the way of poor Colombians' efforts to improve their lives.  |  |  | | The Familias en Acción program targets education and nutrition. |
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Back in the Classroom Ana Elisa León, who also lives in the countryside, knows exactly how the absence of money can cut schooling short. Her two oldest daughters had to drop out of school for two years and were able to re-enroll only because of Familias en Acción. Thanks to the program, she managed to keep four of her five children in school (the oldest, age 22, isn't eligible for the subsidy program) even during a financial emergency. Her coal miner husband's 400,000 pesos a month income was cut by two-thirds in May, 2004, when a foot injury kept him out of the mine for about four months. León's part-time job making snacks at another school pays only 50,000 pesos a month - a fraction of what the family lost because of the mine injury. The children's schooling has not been disrupted simply because of their parents' determination and the subsidy. "I'm thankful every day for that cash," León says. Former Dropout Oscar Alonso Betancourt, 14, returned to school one year after he dropped out in 2002. He moved to Bogotá, where he lived with relatives and worked in an auto muffler shop. Now a student at the Colegio de Educación Básica de La Libertad, he spoke during a lunch break about his ambition to be a pilot, and noted: "Without the subsidy I would have to be working." Maria Jhohana Buitrago Sánchez, 16, who wants to be a doctor, agreed. Like other Familias en Acción classmates, she said the subsidy did not begin to meet all of her family's needs. Even with the financial aid, her mother can barely afford the uniforms, textbooks, school supplies, snacks, and other expenses of keeping her kids in school. But she and her 15-year-old brother, Omar, agreed the money was the only reason they were able to stay in school. Key Focus on Nutrition On a fine morning, Concepción Pulido, 38, prepares lunch in the small kitchen of her three-room house in Barrio el Bato, a neighborhood in Samacá. She, her husband, and three of their four children will dine on a salad of lettuce, cucumbers and tomato, followed by beef sautéed on a coal-fired stove, accompanied by the juice of a tropical fruit, the curua. What sounds like an unremarkable, balanced meal is an innovation for the Pulidos. A couple of years ago, her family's diet comprised little more than potatoes, rice, and pasta. "The children used to have lots of headaches," Pulido says. Workshops organized by Familias en Acción introduced her to the concept of healthy nutrition. With her fifth-grade education - typical of many parents in the program - the idea of healthy nutrition was new. Like other mothers in the program, Pulido followed a workshop instructor's advice to plant a backyard garden, and grow onions, beans, cilantro, and lettuce for her family's table. She grows enough, in fact, to be able to trade some with other mothers who grow spinach and the aromatic herbs which Colombians use to make tea. Through the program, Pulido also learned about birth control and about how to examine herself for breast tumors. Offering a Vision Middle-class Colombians know from adolescence what Familias en Acción teaches adults about nutrition and health. The program targets the poorest of the poor in Colombian towns and small cities like Samacá, with its population of 20,000, in the municipality in Boyacá Department (province) where Gil and Pulido live. There and elsewhere, Familias en Acción goes a step beyond linking payments to continued school enrollment and clinic visits, because the poor lack more than money. "We offer them the vision of the world that exists outside of what they are used to," Rita Combariza, 52, the director of Familias en Acción says. . "We work with them on the beautifying of the home, to impart the idea that we should make the places where we spend our lives more attractive." A historian by training, Combariza has spent most of her career fighting poverty. The experience has convinced her - along with other development veterans - that the key to improving opportunities for children is to strengthen families and strengthening families' means working with women. That is especially true for Familias en Acción, whose main tool is money. "All around the world," Combariza says "those who spend money best are women." |
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