Measurement: Job Training

Before Providing Capital For a New Business, We Often Provide General and Specific Skills Training

Before one can do a job, she must know how to do it. Baking bread, raising chickens, producing a tincture for bronchitis, making jelly or sewing school uniforms requires knowledge, skills, discipline, and effort. The participants in Salvadoran Enterprises for Women businesses come with responsibility and determination but they need training in the technical skills and know how of the specific job. SEW staff in El Salvador contract with local or national trainers who can teach the fledgling women's group such skills.

Specific job training usually takes about three months. When comfortable with the basics and having the success of producing and selling initial items, the groups progress to the next level of training, honing old skills, building new ones and expanding the kinds of products made. Children's clothing is the easiest to make and can be done on regular machines; school uniforms require advanced skills and industrial machines. Natural medicine groups begin by making the salves and tinctures for colds, bronchitis and parasites. Advanced instruction teaches medical remedies for kidney problems, arthritis and skin irritations.

Coordinating a business is a job in itself. Before Salvadoran Enterprises for Women funds a business project, the women must select those who will accept responsibility for basic tasks. Coordinating, bookkeeping, sales and promotion are all roles a member or members of the group agree to learn and do for the business. This takes training so the coordinator is comfortable running a meeting and holding members accountable; so the bookkeeper can keep accurate accounts of income and expenses; and so the sales and promotion persons have the ability to approach community stores, promote the products made and negotiate prices.

The women in SEW businesses have grown up and are raising families within a society that by whatever name it is called—macho, patriarchal, male dominated—is a society where men make the decisions, control how money is spent, do most of the talking, run the businesses in town, civic and governmental agencies. It takes major shifts—in thinking, in awareness, in understanding one's dignity—for a Salvadoran woman to believe she is important, can speak up, is able to make decisions and has a right to decide how the money she earns is spent.

For those reasons, technical training for Salvadoran Enterprises for Women businesses always involves concurrent training in self-esteem, basic human rights, (e.g. it is not acceptable or legal to be beaten by one's husband); gender equality and assertiveness training. The SEW Board would like to be able to say that husbands and village leaders eventually come to see the economic and community benefits of women earning income and making products that improve family and community life. Happily, that is sometimes the case, but not always. SEW staff is committed to accompany the women's groups for a period of time after the business is established to affirm women's confidence and strengthen continued self-reliance.

The women are each others' best support and without exception, each group has said how important it is to have the time together to talk about their lives, family concerns, and issues in the community. Salvadoran Enterprises for Women is committed to empowering women as persons as they also become producers and workers.