Vilma Saloj: Creating an Educational Path for Indigenous Girls in Guatemala
Vilma: Sí, Spiffy! Did you know that Guatemala has the worst gender equity gap in the Americas? Less than 20% of indigenous girls will graduate from secondary school, and fewer than 1% continue to university. The severely substandard Guatemalan educational system compounds this problem. Even when families can and do invest in the promise of education, the school system is failing them. Predictable cycles of early and frequent pregnancy create shackles of intergenerational poverty and exclusion that have kept this talent on the sidelines for centuries. Indigenous women and girls such as myself suffer four forms of discrimination in Guatemala: we are poor, we are women, we are indigenous, and we are from rural villages.