Fundación Entre Mujeres
The history of the Fundación Entre Mujeres (La FEM) is unique in that its beginning as a Nicaraguan non-governmental organization is rooted in helping rural women access land for productive purposes. “It’s important for women to hold land. It’s hard for them to have a life based on equality without it,” says La FEM Director Diana Martinez.
The idea behind the creation of La FEM in 1995 was to build an autonomous organization for rural women that would challenge the traditional, male-dominated hierarchal model of rural agricultural and development organizations. Today, La FEM is also committed to the social, economic and ideological development of rural women. It uses a variety of strategies, including raising women’s consciousness about the struggle against gendered violence, promoting sexual and reproductive rights, and raising the education level of rural women. Additionally, La FEM aims to build a model of sustainable economic production based on principles of solidarity and cooperation among women.
To address these development issues, La FEM operates a number of different programs, such as a mobile health clinic, gender workshops, and sustainable agricultural programs including a land parcel project in which women learn to raise pigs, cows, chickens and roosters on their land.
Through this multilayered development process, La FEM has seen that the women with whom they work have become greater advocates for themselves in their homes, their communities and also at the national level.
Xochilt Acalt Women’s Center
The Center began as a mobile health clinic in the early 1990s, which helped address the high levels of cervical-uterine cancer, treated sexually transmitted diseases, provided family planning, and offered reproductive health education in the city of Malpaisillo and the surrounding rural areas. While health is still a key component of the Center’s work, its projects have expanded to encompass women’s economic, ideological, and political empowerment. “The center gives women a space to develop what already exists within them and to go on from there,” says a participant in the Center’s programs.
Today, in addition to its reproductive health program, Xochilt Acalt offers a variety of interconnected programs. Through its education initiatives, Xochilt Acalt focuses on three main areas—gender, adult, and youth education. Additionally, it works in areas of agricultural production, land legalization (to secure land titles for women), and construction, all of which aim to empower women economically, to develop a new distribution of productive labor within the family, and to build a new model of rural development in which women are key players. Finally, Xochilt Acalt works in citizen participation to help enable women to organize and advocate for themselves on both the municipal and national levels.
Comité de Mujeres Rurales
The Comité de Mujeres Rurales (Rural Women’s Committee) was founded in 1993 in León with a mission of promoting the change of the subordinal conditions in which rural women in the region live through programs designed to increase their access and control of economic, educational, political, and social resources.
To achieve its mission the Rural Women’s Committee employs a number of programs focusing on gender education, gender violence prevention, literacy training, and technical training and empowerment for agriculture and livestock producers.
Additionally, the Committee gives workshops on women’s human rights, the law against domestic violence, and women’s access to justice/legal rights and then formed part of the Network of Popular Defendors (La Red de Defensoras Populares). The network works toward the prevention of sexual and intrafamily violence, and transform themselves into a movement of social independence.
In addition to the organizations profiled above, there are a number of other actors in the Nicaraguan women’s movement that WCCN deeply respects. To read more about women’s movement, click here.
