In this article I want to highlight the importance of education and training for women as an integral part of local and national development. This is one area where countries like Nicaragua have been able to provide a leading example. First
I need to go back to the recent history of Nicaragua in order to explain the particular approach towards education which was developed during the revolutionary period of the 1980s. There are three main elements of this approach which can be seen to have influenced the present-day initiatives:
1. the organisational model of >multiplication= of learning
2. the philosophical model of participative learning
3. the communication model of accessibility of learning materials
The Sunrise of the People
In 1979 the Nicaraguan Sandinista Liberation Front, with the support of large sections of the population, were successful in taking power from the dictator Somoza after years of violent struggle. Women were actively involved in bringing down the dictatorship, through national networking, local insurrection and armed combat. But the revolutionaries were left with a county in ruins, a total material damage to the economy of around US$1,810 million and a crushing national debt of US$1.5 billion, 40,000 orphans and a vastly reduced population. There was an estimated 74% literacy rate and 60% malnutrition.
Within this situation, the way forward was to use the only resource there was - the people. And, in order for the people to take an active part in the reconstruction of the country, they had to be educated. This reconstruction in physical and economic terms as well as in the areas of justice and freedom was already prescribed in the Statutes of the Sandinista Liberation Front. The revolution really began after the deposition of Somoza (see Daniel,1998, among others).
One of the first tasks of the new government was therefore to set up a mass literacy crusade which recruited 50,000 young volunteers, trained them and sent them to teach in the factories, in the slums and in the isolated areas of the countryside.
The organisational model was that of >multiplication= for example, a core group of regional coordinators were trained by foreign experts and then each trained a group of local coordinators who, in turn, trained a group of teachers - who then taught their skills to adult learners. This model aims to multiply the existing expertise as many times as possible and, using large numbers of volunteers, was the most inexpensive model available. It had the added advantage of involving large numbers of young people in the ideological fight against ignorance and enabled them to learn about other sectors of the population, other areas of the country itself.
The first wave of literacy teaching lasted six months but the multiplication factor continued. People=s Education Collectives were set up by volunteers - who had themselves just learnt to read and write - to organise the continuation of adult education classes. They worked in the immediate locality: the hamlet, the state farm, the factory, the neighbourhood. The tasks of each collective included recruitment of local volunteer teachers, providing a centre, encouraging people to use the facility.
Love moved us to fight. Methods and Materials
The teaching methods were based on >a pedagogy for the oppressed= (Freire, 1972). This is underpinned by the philosophy that learning must involve issues of importance to the learners themselves, that they take on an active rôle (participate) in their own learning and that, through a process of reflection on the world about them and re-presenting their own reality, learners develop the means by which to act upon the world, to implement change. Education thus had two principle purposes: firstly, to politicise the people so that they chose to participate in the revolutionary process and secondly, to empower them to do so. And it was carried out in people=s homes or workplaces - education literally came to the people.
Women were at the forefront of this revolution in education, which was called >The Sunrise of the People.= Firstly they were the majority among those to be taught, who now got the opportunity to =wake up their minds=. Women=s rôle in the revolutionary struggle was also celebrated in the literacy materials, for example in Lesson 5 of the basic primer (Ministry of Education, 1979: 22-25). The unit is centred around the powerful image of a woman with her face masked by a scarf and pointing a pistol. This is accompanied by the sentence: >Women fought with arms= (La mujer luchó con las armas). But other concepts strongly associating with the letter >m= for mujer (woman) are included: to die(morir), malaria, Maria. The two aspects of revolutionary woman are shown on the following page. At the top is a photograph of a mother handing over her baby to her daughter, >Maria, look after the little boy for me= (Maria, mirame el muchacho) , while at the bottom is one of the slogans painted on walls which encouraged participation in the revolution: >Courage is the best weapon= (El valor la mejor arma). And finally (for dictation), >Love moved us to fight= (El amor movió a luchar).
Materials were developed nationally on a range of topics - everyday mathematics, agriculture, history of Nicaragua , social sciences - all related closely to people=s lives, their self-identity, their participation and their practical needs. While the artist=s depiction of women tends to emphasise their physical attributes, they are certainly visible as active participants in the different areas of life and work.
Unit 17 on proper fractions from the mathematics textbook (Ministry of Education, 1982: 166-169) exemplifies the practice of contextualising learning politically and economically as well as personalising it. The two main characters are introduced discussing the woman=s trip to Managua. She is a dress maker who has been visiting the now state-owned national clothes company, where the workers are working hard to push up production through better organisation, in order to help the national economy. She too wishes to improve her productivity but hasn=t quite understood the measurements or quantities of material needed for making trousers, because they were given in fractions. The man, we assume to be a volunteer teacher, suggests they go to the education centre to work through the mathematics. Here, active participation of the learners is shown through discussion with the teacher at the blackboard (see illustration below).
Women=s involvement in national development
Young women counted for over 60% of the volunteer teachers not only in this stage, but in subsequent campaigns, often facing physical danger from counter-revolutionaries (see Daniel, 1986).Just as importantly, it tended to be women who ran the local education collectives - and other developments came out of this participation. For example, domestic workers (maids) formed three collectives in one neighbourhood of Managua alone; they then went on to join the newly established domestic workers= union and to set up a maids= collective in the neighbourhood (Deighton et al, 1982).
Nicaraguan women were similarly involved in the health campaigns, which were also organised on the multiplier model. Women counted for more than 75% of health volunteers who took crash courses in health education, vaccination and hygene. They dominated the local health councils, which were run on similar lines to the education collectives, and organised specially designated health days in their own locality - regular vaccinations for all children, rubbish collection and latrine digging, distributing leaflets on issues such as public hygene and breastfeeding. These initiatives rapidly reduced the rate of preventable diseases like polio, which was soon eradicated. (Deighton et al, op cit)
A longitudinal study carried out on the effects of the literacy campaign in Nicaragua indicates that women who learnt to read and write as adults in this period have healthier children (see Epstein, 1995). The research has not yet identified specific reasons for this but it is likely that it is the result of a combination of factors: increased access - and attention - to relevant health information, a greater confidence in using hospitals and clinics, and an active involvement in social change at local and family level . This means they were likely to have been trained as a health volunteer or gained experience in other areas, such as administration or management of resources and people, as member of the >local defence committee=.
Also dominated by women, these committees defended the community physically with arms, as well as metaphorically by overseeing equal distribution of scarce resources, food rations, building materials and ensuring the participation of others. Unfortunately, it is not easy to replicate the commitment of these grassroots revolutionaries in adult education situations in other countries!
My Little Baby Book. Educational comics
The success of public information campaigns relied on this organisation and commitment at local level, that is, on the involvement of women. It also, of course, depended on a literate population. In addition, information had to be accessible and acceptable to the people. Examples of educational material that were circulated in the neighbourhood while I was living in Managua reflect the skills that were developed in the dissemination of information, in a way that empowered readers and contributed to development at the same time. Basically, they were educational comics, about 14 pages long.
One example was a booklet entitled My Little Baby Book, which was produced jointly by the coordinating organisation for local defence committees, the Ministry of Health and an organisation promoting healthy eating (Ministry of Health, 1987). The childminder, Estela, who took care of my baby while I was working, acquired this comic herself and pinned the pull-out central chart up on the wall. This shows what food the baby should get at different times of the day and at different ages. Up till eight months old, the main food is still mother=s milk (hay que darle solo pecho: only breast feeding will do!). Estela, a young woman of about 20, was attending evening classes at the local education collective, to finish her basic education. She followed the information in the leaflet and my baby never fell ill.
Another example is a booklet circulated as a pull out from one of the national newspapers. It is one in a series which aimed to encourage families to develop gardens not only for the purpose of growing vegetables to eat - thus augmenting the family diet and saving money - but also to protect the soil and improve the general environment. The whole family is shown participating in this endeavour. This comic was for families living in town, while other leaflets were aimed at families with smallholdings in the countryside (Nicaraguan Food Programme, 1987).
Mobilisation or Marginalisation?
In such ways, literacy was closely linked to women=s involvement in social action for community and national development during the 1980s in Nicaragua. However, it has been argued that this involvement only met women=s short-term practical gender needs (that is, those related to their traditional role as carers of the household and, by extension, the community). It did not address their strategic gender needs, that is, the long-term goals of destroying the roots of women=s subordination, challenging the gender-specific division of labour and attacking institutionalised oppression of women (Molyneux, 1985). Despite the fact that women=s involvement was vital to social development, women continued to be marginalised in decision-making at all levels. It has been argued that the failure of the Sandinista government to take on board women=s wider needs contributed to the downfall of the government in the 1990 elections (see Randall, 1994).
Post 1990 We share the same struggle
Since the elections in 1990, when the revolutionary government was replaced by a right-wing coalition, the economic situation for the poor majority has worsened, largely due to structural adjustment imposed as a condition of loans by the World Bank. An estimated 44% of the people are living in >acute poverty= as defined by the United Nations and many of these households are headed by women who try - by whatever means - to provide basic necessities for their children. The reduced size of newborn children reflects the decline in healthcare and social welfare. Increases in alcoholism, drug abuse and domestic violence are other problems which women have to cope with (Daniel, 1994).
Public sector cuts have been particularly severe in the area of adult education and many women have returned to virtual illiteracy (see Collinson, 1990). However, literacy classes have continued through the work of voluntary / community groups, often supported by Non-Governmental Organisations. These programmes still relate reading to the environment, health and gender issues (see Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, 1994; Puntos de Encuentro, 1995: 38)
Within this situation, women are still active in the field of education and training. A major difference is that , in this recent period, women are directly addressing women=s concerns and developing initiatives around them: in other words, addressing strategic as well as practical gender needs.
Networking
One important locus for these initiatives is an independent women=s collective based in Managua called Puntos de Encuentro (Meeting Points) whose mission is >to transform everyday life=. A major popular education project run by this collective is the bimonthly magazine >la Boletina= (simply meaning Bulletin) which has a circulation of 20,000 and is distributed free to women=s groups. I can testify to the bulletin reaching the most isolated places, for example, I saw one in the staffroom of the primary school in Pearl Lagoon, a community on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua which can only be only accessed by boat.
Each edition contains articles and research on a different theme; recent themes have included women=s working hours, child sexual abuse, abortion. There is discussion about government policy affecting women; news on women organising throughout Latin America; and practical advice. The magazine also, importantly, includes contributions from local women=s groups, providing a forum for women across the country to share their strategies for overcoming problems for example, a group of women made redundant from union jobs in the north getting together to form small businesses.
The publication uses similar techniques to those in the previous decade to make the information accessible and relevant to its readership; pictures, dialogues, personal stories, poems and humour - for instance the book review section is entitled >Books don=t bite.. and neither does feminism!=
The Puntos de Encuentro collective have also initiated the Women=s University. This provides courses in the areas of women=s legal rights; gender and development; gender, leadership and communication, which are accredited by the Interdisciplinary Programme of Gender Studies of the Central America University in Managua. Courses consist of intensive workshops of two or three days and weekly sessions of three and a half hours, all of which work on the same principles as the literacy campaign; empowerment through active participation. They are primarily for women involved in grassroots development work who want to improve their theoretical knowledge and practical skills and who are able to transfer this knowledge to other women in their locality.
The multiplier effect is thus still very much in evidence. Another example is the Nicaraguan Network Against Violence which has very successfully brought together over 170 different organisations - including youth groups, trade unions and political parties - in support of their campaign to highlight domestic violence. The network aims to influence government policy and at the same time to institute practical measures to combat the problem of violence. In particular they have promoted the training of local advocates or grassroots counsellors in the regions.
Gender awareness through literacy
In the Matagalpa region in the north, such initiatives are spearheaded by Grupo Venancia, a women=s collective based in Matagalpa city. They run a participative radio programme as well as literacy classes for women, using their own teaching materials which are aimed at raising awareness about gender issues. Women are encouraged to discuss the causes of violence, for example, and to seek solutions through collective action. For example, lesson 2 from the literacy primer In our own words reads: >When they hit you, do not remain silent or feel ashamed, make it public, do not blame yourself, denounce the person so that the police can punish him...= (from Podro, op. cit.).
Through regional conferences and workshops in outlying areas organised by Grupo Venancia, rural women have begun to break their silence. A local network of women advocates has been developed, spreading out to rural communities, to make sure that cases of violence are reported and that women receive support from each other. In the remote area of Waslala, the Commission for the Defence of Women have now developed a system for bringing rapists to trial. (see Podro, 1996)
Grupo Venancia have been involved in international developments in approaches to gender and literacy teaching, through its influence on the ActionAid programme REFLECT (Regenerated Freirean Literacy Through Empowering Community Techniques). They began to develop a gender focus through some of the units, for example, the Wheel of Relationships: From whom do we receive support and love? From whom do we receive criticism and abuse? They focused on the private sphere, the development of self-esteem and confidence, and the key issue of sexuality in relation to empowerment (see Metcalfe and Gomi, 1998).
An international workshop, organised for REFLECT by Grupo Venancia in 1998, focused on the gender implications of power relations at personal, organisational and societal levels. The participants explored how these could be addressed through the REFLECT methods of >mapping= - the group construction of diagrams for analysis and discussion. It became clear that gender awareness among all those participating - including the male partners of women learners as well as the implementing agency staff - was critical to the success of the wider strategic aims of literacy teaching for women (Metcalfe, 1999).
Women and community participation
In another area of its work, Grupo Venancia has supported the development of the economy, particularly through productive collectives in areas of work not normally associated with women beekeeping, farming and building. The continuation of the >education for development= principle is demonstrated in one of Grupo Venancia=s booklets, entitled Being a Woman in the countryside. Through the same kind of picture story, concrete examples and the personalised dialogue with the reader which characterises the educational material of the 1980s, the booklet explains in detail how to carry out a diagnostic of the needs of the community. It addresses the following questions:
1. why is it important what happens in our communities?
2. what is a diagnosis?
3. what=s the point of carrying out a diagnosis?
4. how can we ensure the participation of the community in the diagnostic?
5. what methods can you best use to collect the information? (Vasquez,1993:2).
Examples from other communities are given, as when they refer to La Esperanza where:
...among other problems, we had one which bothered us most. Every year when we sowed, there was one part of the harvest which didn=t give us a good yield. We had a meeting to see what was happening and what we could do. We found the reason, it was because the earth had lost moisture because too many trees were being cut down. This united us and helped us to work together.. we decided we had to canalise the earth so that the water would filter down better and we had to replant the forest... This is how we succeeded in solving the problem at the roots.
(Vasquez, 1993: 7).
At the conclusion of this 20 page booklet is an effective summary which could stand for the whole work of Grupo Venancia in empowering women at local level: >In this sense the diagnostic process helps us women to be more aware of all the factors of our situation, to understand why we are as we are and to plan our actions with greater organisation and participation.= (Vasquez, 1993:10)
Women in decision-making
Community development also depends on decisions taken by others outside the community. Women need to be involved in influencing those decisions on a wider scale to ensure that funding programmes maximise use of local resources and are genuinely for the benefit of local people - including women.
In the run-up to the general elections in October 1996, the importance of the rôle of women in the future development of the country was increasingly recognised. This was not only in regard to their numerical power to influence the vote, but also in the necessity for women to play an active part in public representation and in decision making at community level and upwards. A national >education for citizenship= programme, established by the Centre for Constitutional Rights in Managua, aimed to enable women to understand their rights and to pressurise to obtain them, through the electoral process - for example, through a women=s platform. The programme was organised through women=s groups and involved training up key local women to train others in candidature skills and community leadership. A similar course for women interested in political participation was organised in 1993 prior to the first Regional Elections on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua; from this course three women went on to become elected representatives on the Regional Council (Daniel, 1996b).
The women=s platform that was presented to the political parties demanded the inclusion of women=s rights in the human rights agenda (for example, in the areas of health, sexual choice and safety from violence). It also included a range of issues which reflected women=s concern with, and understanding of, the future of the nation: an economic programme based on sustainable people-centred development, respect for the environment, recognition of women=s rights to land ownership, access to credit and training for women and employment projects for unemployed women, to enable them to become economically active (Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, 1996). As Angelica Brown, one of the Regional Councillors on the Atlantic Coast says:
>
Networking has helped us to influence the law= (Daniel 1996a).Conclusion
Women in Nicaragua reflect a high level of political awareness. They have the ability to define their own needs, to suggest viable solutions and to implement these. That is why, despite the poverty of the country and the desperate problems women face there, their creativity and courage in community development continues to challenge those of us in the West still searching for our own solutions.
What I have tried to show is that education for women plays a vital rôle in this process. In all these initiatives one element is common - lasting impact depends on women of a community being trained as trainers in order to ensure the development of other women in that community. In areas such as economic development, public information, welfare and political activity, it is the trained local woman who is the catalyst for change.
As one Peruvian historian puts it
The rôles of woman, mother and citizen all overlap. There are no clear distinctions between the private and the public and no restriction on women
(Villavicienco, 1992: 67)
The challenge to academic feminists, whether in Latin America or in Europe, lies in the implication that analysis without social action will not so effectively challenge the patriarchical world order as will access courses for rural women. On the other hand, grassroots education for women needs to be implemented as part of a wider vision of change, through an organisational system and a participative learning philosophy which enable us to involve as many people as possible and to make optimal use of the human resources that we have. Gender awareness needs to be an integral part of this process.
References
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Last updated 1.12.2002