Empowering Women and Youth Entrepreneurs in Nicaragua

In January of this year, F2F volunteer, Janet Hernandez, had the opportunity to work with Junior Achievement Nicaragua (JA) in Sisin, a Miskito community located in the North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region (RAAN), and a community of young leaders in Managua. The Miskito communities of Sisin and Bilwi are comprised of mostly farmers and tend to have traditional family structures, with the women tending to the household needs. During this assignment, Janet sought to empower young girls with both communication skills and tools to build their self-esteem.

In Sisin, Janet conducted workshops on themes focusing on leadership, empowerment, team-building, sexism and gender roles, and community assessment and reflection. She also integrated activities that analyze systems of oppression and build leadership and relationship skills. Janet believes that JA would benefit by incorporating themes of gender and self-esteem into their programs. Interestingly, unlike most workshops, these lessons were done in Spanish and then translated to Miskito to better connect with the participants. 

In Managua, Janet held four training sessions on leadership and soft skills for a total of 106 individuals. Two of these sessions were open to the public while the others were directed at JA staff. In additon, Janet also held meetings with JA staff to create plans to make their programs more effective moving forward. Junior Achievements programs have had noticeably positive impact on participants. Due to this success, JA is seeking to be more cohesion with other branches in the different communities that they serve. This means developing a system to monitor and evaluate the programs as well as creates work plans so that facilitators and coordinators can work with the same material and cater the programs best to their audiences. To go along with this, Janet spoke extensively with various program leaders about updating the current leadership manual. She believes that the manual can be more effective if it is updated to adapt to new leadership and community organization methodologies. She is eager to continue to engage with these individuals to assist in this process. 

Looking forward, Junior Achievement is seeking to expand into other rural communities like Sisin and Santa Marta. The organization will also begin collaborating heavily with local community leaders in order to garner more support and resources for their programs. We are excited to continue supporting Junior Achievement Nicaragua in this process!