Letting Women Choose: A Colombian Conservation Organization Empowering Women through Family Planning Services
A special guest blog by our partners at Women for Conservation.
When women are empowered, their communities and the natural environment benefit. That has been the guiding principle of Sara Inés Lara, Founder and Executive Director of the Colombian non-profit Women for Conservation. Our organization has achieved great success protecting endangered species and important habitats by tackling the socioeconomic causes of environmental degradation, most notably by providing life-changing resources to women and children living in rural communities. Partnering with Planet Women has increased our capacity to protect nature and empower women and communities, and one major way we do that is by providing career training, conservation education, health care and family planning services to women and girls living near protected areas.
Celebrating and supporting mothers is Women for Conservation’s past, present, and future when it comes to protecting endangered wildlife in Colombia. The seeds of our work were planted decades ago by Sara’s late mother, Amparo, who was admired in the rural Andean communities of Colombia for empowering marginalized women. Sara has continued this mission since 1998, when she was appointed as the Executive Director of ProAves, where she led the charge engaging women as community leaders to save the critically endangered yellow-eared parrot from extinction.
Empowering women to be engaged as environmental stewards proved to be wildly successful; the parrots’ population grew from only 81 individuals to over 2,800 just two decades later. Now the legacy has continued with Sara’s own daughter, Isabella Cortes, who grew up helping her mother and is now the Director of Conservation for our fieldwork in Colombia.
While Women for Conservation began by working with rural women living around critical nature reserves to provide sustainable career training and conservation education, Sara quickly found that these programs were inaccessible to many women due to a lack of basic survival resources. Understanding that communities cannot invest in biodiversity conservation when they are struggling to meet their basic needs, Sara Ines Lara began empowering girls and women in a new way — by ensuring access to family planning education and resources.
Preventing unintended teen pregnancies increases girls’ ability to obtain an education, which is correlated with poverty alleviation, increased literacy rates, and community health benefits. Basically, when women are given access to basic human rights such as education and family planning resources, the whole community benefits and human impacts on the environment are often greatly reduced.
Since January 2020, Women For Conservation has conducted more than 77 community workshops with women and children, covering sustainable career training, conservation education and women’s health and family planning services. Every woman deserves control of her body and the opportunity to choose if and when she wants to start a family. When girls delay having children, they are able to finish school, maternal mortality rates decrease, and mothers tend to have fewer children overall, putting less strain on scarce natural resources.
Women who choose to utilize contraceptive resources are often better equipped to educate and care for the children they do have, and build their own futures by attending the career and conservation workshops we provide. Since the beginning of the pandemic (and despite the complications caused by it), Women for Conservation has provided a total 849 women and girls with family planning resources, including contraceptive implants, sex education, tubal litigation, and vasectomies for men.
In our recent project in Zona Bananera, Santa Marta, we have already provided 72 women with implants so far in 2022. This region is dominated by Banana monocrops, which has left access to clean water scarce for a community where almost half the population lives on less than $54 USD a month. Our Women for Conservation Project Coordinator, Kelly Julio, has family in this community, and her sister offered her house as a make-shift family planning clinic due to the lack of adequate health facilities.
Kelly told us she is passionate about this work because she wants to help women who struggle to provide for their children. She points out that while population pressure can degrade the environment, polluted natural resources also negatively affect these communities that depend on them for basic survival needs. Mothers, as caretakers of children, are the hardest hit when natural resources cannot provide for their families’ most basic needs.
“The rivers are becoming polluted and nature is ever more impacted [by people]. We need to become water protectors. When there’s ever less food, jobs and water, it scares me to think of bringing more babies into the world. What kind of situation are we bringing them into? When girls have unplanned pregnancies, they cannot be adequate carers and often, they’re not able to provide for their babies.” –Kelly Julio
The girls themselves also had a lot to say about why they got implants, and why they want more young women to have the opportunity to choose when to have children. Many of the girls who receive implants from us are teenagers, and most are already mothers.
Andris Arias, who is 19 with two children, spoke to us in the backyard of the clinic, as she rocked her 7 month old baby. She told us how a lack of access to reproductive resources forced her to drop out of school at age 15.
“When I got pregnant, I was too embarrassed to stay in school. If I had heard about the family planning clinic earlier, I could have avoided pregnancy. I’m not going to have another one now, that would only set me back more. In the future I’d like to study and I also want my children to study. If the mother succeeds, her children can as well. They can do what I didn’t manage to do.” –Andris Arias
Linda Gabriel Sierra, a 20 year-old mother of one, is passionate about the need for family planning resources in her community. She told us that this implant would allow her to continue her studies and pursue her career goals.
“Personally, I decided to get the implant because it’s necessary to prevent unwanted and early pregnancies. This program has helped us a lot because here in the community where we live there are many, many girls who haven’t finished school and they’re already pregnant. Their boyfriends leave them, they don’t live together, and so this program really helps us because in this way, for some time we can avoid getting pregnant. I believe that this program has been very good for all of us.”–Linda Gabriel Sierra
A third perspective from 18-year-old Ana Marquis illustrates how access to contraception can be important for the physical, mental, and emotional health of women and their future children.
“I chose to get the implant because I have already lost two babies, one in 2020 and another in 2021. It was so painful. But this implant lets me decide when to have my children. Now I can study, work, see the world, and in the future I can have children when I have a job and when I’m able to give my child more opportunities. But right now I’m looking after myself so that I can study and not have to worry about getting pregnant.” –Ana Marquis
Every woman deserves control of her body and the opportunity to choose if and when she wants to start a family. Having access to contraceptive care is critical for women to be able to determine their own futures. When women are empowered to shape their own futures, humanity benefits in so many ways. Increased women’s education and health improves outcomes for sustainability, community health, overall education, and the alleviation of poverty.
Empowering girls and women to prevent unintended pregnancies also lessens the strain on natural resources, and allows them to invest more in the children they already have and have the capacity to get involved directly in conservation work. Women are capable of making incredibly valuable contributions to environmental protection, but as long as they cannot access basic human rights such as education and family planning resources, their potential will be stifled.
Giving women the resources to prevent unwanted pregnancies is one of the most powerful ways we can empower women and protect the earth. This Mother’s Day, please consider donating to our work empowering women and mothers in rural communities. It only takes $120 to provide contraceptive implants and health care visits for a girl for up to 5 years, and this can make all the difference for the future of these women and their children.
