This week’s SoroptiVoice blog comes from Sue Biggs, SIGBI Federation Programme Director. Here she shares SIGBI’s 3E project, and a chance encounter with a young lady from The Gambia at CSW 56. 

The schedule is printed well in advance, you see your name in black and white, then you don’t give it another thought until …. Suddenly you are faced with the email from the SI office politely requesting your blog. Then if you are anything like me there is a moment’s panic as you wrack your brains for the bon mot, the starting point. So here goes!!!

Our Federation Project for 2011-2014 is the 3E Project: Healthcare with our partners Maternal Child Health Advocacy International.  We are working together in The Gambia to raise money to create an effective path of emergency care from the home to the hospital, and we plan to do so in 4 ways:

1. Training health  staff, community workers, and traditional birth attendants in emergency skills (and then training some of them to become trainers so they can continue to teach their colleagues);
2. Refurbishing health care facilities;
3. Supplying necessary medical devices, drugs, and equipment and ;
4. Setting up emergency transport facilities (ambulances and boats).

SIGBI President Maureen Maguire has just returned from a trip to The Gambia where she saw the facilities for herself. She visited the hospital at Brikama where maternal mortality has lessened significantly and new born babies are in much less danger. The project, which has so many links with “Birthing in The Pacific”, is vital to the lives of  rural women and girls.

 

It was a great pity that no conclusions were reached at this year’s CSW, which was all about rural women, but that will not stop civil society’s  fight for those rural women who do not have access to the basic services we take for granted. It is to one such woman I now turn.

Whilst at CSW I met an energetic young Gambian Lady called Klaudia Jagne who has set up an NGO to work with rural women in The Gambia. She is teaching them self-sufficiency by growing vegetables and fruit and selling the produce to the large hotels in Banjul. With the profits the women are buying more land and have set themselves up a school with several computers which are used by the young people to provide opportunities for young people in the tourist industry – the main employer in The Gambia.

I recently received an email from her and I would like to share her words with you:

“It was great meeting and learning of the wonderful work Soroptimist International has been doing in The Gambia and internationally. The quest to support, empower, educate and assist women in self-development wherever they might be is a challenge for each and every woman. I believe that what affects one woman, affects all women.  I have personally for the past 9 years learnt enormously and grown personally through my interaction with the rural women in Gambia and have gone on a  personal crusade to bring about change in the lives of these women. It is not always easy, the journey through change is sometimes very lonely and could be challenging, exhausting and even depressing, but it is only through an unwavering commitment, determination and courage that it will come. I am convinced that with our tireless efforts, we will not only be able to bring about change on the status of women internationally, but we are creating a solid foundation for the generation of future women leaders.”

I hope that over the next three years we meet again and possibly end up working together to help the rural women of  The Gambia!