The Curumim Group, a feminist and anti-racist organization, has just completed 32 years of strengthening women's citizenship at all stages of their lives.
One of Grupo Curumim's programs is Cunhatã, which means adolescent in Tupi Guarani. With the support of the IWHC and IPPFRHO, the program develops educational activities and ongoing political training aimed at adolescents and young people to exercise citizenship. They enter the program as young girls and remain teenagers, as spokespeople for their own causes.
With the arrival of the pandemic and the suspension of face-to-face classes, the question arose: How to continue the training process? The first idea was to continue with video classes. But the scenario was much more complex: 60% of the girls didn't have a cell phone and those who did had some kind of problem. Many of them used a relative's cell phone, which was often the only device in the family.
They then started a campaign to raise funds to buy cell phones and to ask for cell phone donations, with the involvement of many other feminist organizations in Pernambuco.
Having won the first battle for access to cell phones, there was another challenge! How to guarantee access to the internet? A single video sent to them would deplete their mobile internet data credits. These girls couldn't be excluded from the training process because they didn't have the resources.
The Cunhatã program went in search of new support for the internet and for platforms that consumed less data. To find resources and reduce costs at the same time.
They won! The Cunhatã program started teaching how to use the resources. Now, in 2021, it's the young women who have learned who are teaching the new young women joining the program. Resilience is the word for these complex times.