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PO Box A524
Sydney South NSW 1235, Level 11, 227 Elizabeth Street Sydney NSW 2000

Telephone: 1800 812 164

© 2024 Opportunity International AustraliaABN 83 003 805 043

Poverty has many faces

By Simon Lynch

As we honour Anti-Poverty Week this week, I’m thinking about the many faces of poverty and how we need to understand and address each of them if we are to help families break the cycle of poverty.  

Microfinance gives families a livelihood and regular incomes to buy life’s necessities, but many other challenges hold families back and prevent them from lifting themselves out of poverty. If families are constantly sick because they drink polluted water from the well, or women in India can’t work because of the injuries they sustain through domestic violence or constant urinary tract infections from dehydration and the use of rags and leaves instead of sanitary napkins, then they will be less able to make the journey out of poverty.

Opportunity International Australia wants to give families the freedom to make choices and while money allows some choices, families lose the ability to make them if they are unaware of information about health, education or other services that could help them achieve their goals. Opportunity collaborates with partners who provide education, health, domestic violence and digital financial services, which give families the tools they need to lift themselves out of poverty. One of the benefits of the network of relationships our in-country partners have built with families throughout Asia by providing microfinance, is that loan recipients trust them and they can introduce specialist partners to them who provide the additional services they need.

In India, we support the Healing Fields Health Foundation, which trains women to become health leaders in their communities. We are also piloting this program in Indonesia. Seema Bharti is one of the women in India who learnt to be a health leader. Many families in Seema’s village live below the poverty line and preventable diseases are a major problem. As with many communities near the River Ganges, the groundwater is contaminated with arsenic, which slowly poisons people. Typhoid and tuberculosis are also major health issues and each year, young children die from diarrhoea caused by E. coli-contaminated water since open defecation is the norm.

Seema

After becoming a health leader, Seema educated her local community about basic health and hygiene practices and discovered her community had been granted funding to build toilets in every household. Despite some resistance, Seema and other women from her village lobbied authorities to build the toilets. They eventually agreed and now everyone in Seema’s village has one. Seema plans to keep creating change for her community. She is now focused on getting a safe source of clean water for the village, so community members are no longer at risk of arsenic poisoning and typhoid. Her husband is helping her and she is proud to consider herself a leader within the community, creating real change for her friends and family.

We support the UltraPoor program in the Philippines that two of our in-country program partners are implementing. The program is focused on families who are not yet ready for microfinance because of the level of poverty in which they live. In weekly home visits, they learn how to establish a small business, so they are eventually able to apply for a loan and build their own businesses. The families are provided with the assets they need for a business such as piglets or chickens and feed. The program takes a holistic approach to poverty alleviation and as well as educating families about hygiene and health, refers them to healthcare providers. It also helps the families access clean water and sanitation and government services and gets them involved with local community groups.

Marilyn lives with her husband in a humble shelter with their three children, aged seven, ten and twelve.  Without any assets that might earn her an income, no government support and no regular employment, each day Marilyn struggles to buy enough food to feed her family – let alone pay for her children to go to school. Marilyn has been selected as one of the first participants in Opportunity's LIFE program. She's selected a piglet and sari-sari store as her enterprises. She'll receive training on how to raise the pig to market and how to develop her small business, as well as the assets to get started. Each week, she’ll get a visit from the Program Officer for mentoring and coaching, as well as encouragement to put aside savings. At the end of two years, life should look very different for Marilyn and her family. She’ll have a regular income from diversified sources. Her family will eat at least two good meals a day. They’ll have access to safe drinking water and a toilet. Most importantly, she’ll be equipped with both the skills and the resources to sustain their progress out of poverty.

One of the main reasons women are excluded from the workforce in India is domestic violence, with over 1 in 2 women being impacted by it. Opportunity supports a program in India, Operation Peacemakers, that helps women stay safe through counselling and support services.

Sarah is a PeaceMaker from Hyderabad in India. As a PeaceMaker, she supports women who are experiencing domestic violence and informs them about the services that are in place to help them and their families resolve the issue. Sarah participates in community and school meetings to educate families about domestic violence and how it can be avoided or stopped. Challenging perceptions that ’home’ matters should not be discussed outside of the family, Sarah encourages both men and women to undertake counselling where they can learn more about how to cultivate respectful, violence-free relationships. Most families, she says, don’t recognise the underlying cause of misunderstandings and violence as they only focus on the violent act – this is where counselling can help. Sarah has counselled over 40 families in her role as a PeaceMaker and is much loved in her community. She’s grateful to be helping families – especially women – lead lives of dignity and peace.

Sarah

It’s wonderful to meet families in india who because of microfinance are able to provide three meals-a-day and clothes, but it is even more fantastic when you find out their five-year old son didn’t die from drinking E. Coli contaminated water from the well. This is just one of the outcomes of the relationships Opportunity is forming with specialist program providers in Asia. Program providers who address the multiple faces of poverty and their root causes.

 

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