LatinaLista —
Campaign: HipGIVE: Un camino hacia la ciencia: por las jóvenes indígenas de Chiapas (A road towards science for the indigenous youth of Chiapas)
Chiapas is a state in the Southwest of Mexico and one of the poorest in the country. According to data from the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval), in 2012 38% of the population lives in extreme poverty.
The future is very limited for the majority of girls and young women in Chiapas: they study elementary school, marry young, have children and subsist on the little money that they can earn or that their husbands give them. Dependency and poverty is their outlook on life.
In the elementary schools of Chiapas there are about 380,000 girls, but in middle schools there are only 135,000, in high school, 94,000 and in technical and professional studies, there are only 4,200 (the majority of these students are from more developed areas of the state, such as Tuxtla, the capital city.)
Only 1.1% of the girls who enter elementary school in Chiapas complete a university education. There are two main factors for this level of desertion: tradition and poverty. Some of the traditions of the region (such as the vision of women as wives and mothers coupled with extreme poverty) give priority to the boys staying in school.
That tradition is so deeply embedded that many women never consider the possibility of having the same rights as the men to study and have a profession.
The PAUTA project will work to support 20 young women from different indigenous communities in Chiapas so that they do not abandon their studies.
The campaign’s goal is $22,000
