My Last Day Is Today
Colombian Adriana Correa is participating in a three-week long mentoring program through the U.S. State Department’s Empowering Women Through Sports program. While at the WSF, Adriana will learn about the work that we do and implement our tactics into an action plan that aims to improve the physical and mental health of Columbian Border girls. Adriana serves currently under the Colombian Ministry for Foreign Affairs as a Consultant for Border, Sport and Cultural Issues. Read on to learn about Adriana last week:
Today is my last day participating in a three-week long mentoring program through the U.S. State Department’s Empowering Women Through Sports.
It was such an amazing experience. I really hope more women will have the same opportunity I just had at the Women’s Sports Foundation. I was tasked with working on an Action Plan as part of the States Department’s Sport Mentoring Program and the idea I had, it’s now finished: a project for girls based on the GoGirlGo! curriculum from WSF.
Last post I mentioned my challenge was going to be to convince the Colombian governors why we should have a program just for girls. I have already found some data relating to inequity that still exists between men and women in my country. We must create opportunities for women and thus close the gap: in an average week women spend 40 hours on paid work and men 48. During the same week women spend 32 hours on unpaid work and men, only 13. The working hours of women exceed that of men by 11 hours a week.
Also, 79.5% of forced displaced people are women and children; poverty grows mostly in the female population; the results of the test called PISA shows that women had lower results by 31 points for math, and 21 in science. However, the most profitable careers are precisely related to these areas. Teen pregnancy remains high, with one in five women aged 15 to 19 years have ever been pregnant and the gross earnings gap between men and women in 2011 stood at 19.6%.
What is interesting about this information is that you can pretty much find a solution for all these problems mentioned through sports. According to research by the Women’s Sports Foundation, four out of five executive businesswomen played sports growing up. Exercise itself may be associated with increased cognitive energy and learning; female athletes were less likely to have unprotected sex, sex with multiple partners, or sex under the influence of alcohol/drugs. You can go on to mention all the benefits of sports as you review studies conducted by the WSF.
What I mean by all this is to reflect a bit of the knowledge I am taking back to my country after this extraordinary experience with the Women’s Sports Foundation.
Thanks for the knowledge, inspiration and affection that you gave me these days. I will miss you and hopefully I will carry a piece of the amazing work you have done so far to my beloved Country.