‘A man marries his housekeeper and that country’s GDP falls’: On becoming a feminist

It was 1995. I had just started working in the United Nations system, as a junior professional officer in the Havana office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). One evening I was reading the latest UNDP Human Development Report (HDR), whose special topic that year was gender. The report painted a bleak picture of gender inequality around the world, and it provided plenty of evidence. The problem happened in every country, with more extreme differences in some countries than in others.

My Journey Through Gender Analysis

Six years ago, when I was 25 years old, I had the chance to start working as a researcher at the center for research and statistics in the Salvadoran Foundation for Economic and Social Development (FUSADES).

The Woman Who Was Born Again

It’s been almost eight years now. 

The memory is still fresh in my mind. It was a rainy night of July 6, 2011, and my baby boy was only 5 months old. I was in the dining room of my parents’ house, watching the TV news about the disappearance of Cristina Siekavizza.  

The lost voices in the forest – The case of poor indigenous women in Guatemala

Sometimes, in the deep wild forests of Guatemala, weird inaudible noises appear. Noises that can’t be identified as wild birds or falling trees. These recurrent noises are different, they are not natural. Someone could say they resemble voices, but have become so normalized, that people don’t pay attention to them anymore

Why International Development Needs Storytelling

I’ve always been interested in storytelling. A story is a time-tested way to pass experiences down from one person to another. A story is how wisdom is shared with the next generation, whether a historical text or a bedtime story, and it’s how we as development practitioners inspire action and change. Storytelling got me interested in communications and it’s the reason I believe that we need to build storytelling into all our project plans.