Walk In Her Shoes
Imagine bringing up your family in such grinding poverty that you cannot afford to send your daughter to school. Instead, you and she must walk for hours every day to fetch heavy loads of water and firewood, just to survive. You don’t have time to find paid employment. Every step you take moves you and her further away from fulfilling your potential.
It’s a sad fact that women are more affected by poverty – 70% of the world’s poorest billion people are female. In poor communities, fetching food, water or other items like firewood is a responsibility that falls most heavily on women and girls. Not only is this exhausting work, but tragically it leaves little time for basic opportunities, such as going to school or gaining paid employment.
Walk In Her Shoes
To mark International Women’s Day on 8 March, aid and development agency CARE International is challenging women in the UK to pick any week in March to walk 10, 000 steps every day. That’s approximately five miles each day in solidarity with women and girls who have to walk long distances every day just to survive.
Participants will be sent everything they need, including a pedometer to track their steps. For more information please visit the Care / Walk in Here Shoes website or email challenge@careinternational.org
Participants will help women like Yalemie, a 37- year old from Ethiopia. Yalemie used to walk two hours to the river twice a day to collect water for her family. Her daughter would miss school so she could help her mother.
“I fetched water from the river like the animals – we drank together with dogs, donkeys and horses. There were diseases like diarrhoea” said Yalemie.
She is now part of a CARE supported Water committee that built a pump. Now she walks 250 metres to get clean, safe water and her daughter has time to go to school. She is also employed as the water pump attendant and can invest in her family.