Promoting women’s voices

Why does CARE fight poverty by focusing on women and girls?

It’s simple: in the world’s poorest communities, women and girls bear the brunt of poverty. Fighting poverty in those communities means focusing on women and girls to end the inequality that keeps them, and their families and communities, locked in poverty.

When families struggle to grow enough food to eat, or earn enough money to send all their children to school, it’s the girls who are often the last to eat and the first to be kept home from school.

In these same communities, it’s the women who are frequently denied the right to own the land they’ve farmed their entire lives.

And where girls and women are denied freedom to leave their homes or walk down a street, they struggle to earn a living, attend school or even visit a doctor.

But girls and women aren’t just the faces of poverty; they’re also the key to overcoming it.

CARE’s 70 years of experience makes clear that when you empower a girl or a woman, she becomes a catalyst for positive change whose success benefits everyone around her.

Empowering women

At CARE, we support poor women’s struggles to achieve their full and equal human rights. In these struggles, women strive to balance practical, daily, individual achievements with long-term efforts to challenge unequal social rules and institutions.

We aim to strengthen the voice of women and girls and enable them to effectively participate in and influence the decisions that affect their lives.

We also promote gender equality not just as an aim in itself, but as an integral part of all our work: from health projects that focus on maternal, sexual and reproductive health, to livelihoods projects that focus on creating more opportunities for women to work and gain an income.