Each year, the Advancing Development Goals international Contest for Graduate Students (the Geneva Challenge) sets teams of masters students the task of devising a pragmatic solution to a major international development problem.
The 2014 winners were Catalina Correa, Maria Adelaida Martinez and Laura Martinez from Universidad de los Andes in Colombia for their project, Empowering female sex workers in the city of Bogotá: From Stigma to Empowerment, a Health Rights Approach. We talked to them about how their project had been brought to life.
What was the big idea behind your project?
Sex workers, like other vulnerable populations, are often excluded from vital services – healthcare, access to housing, education etc. Not only are sex workers not receiving the healthcare they need, neither are their children. They are being deprived of their fundamental human rights. The reason for this is the stigma, or prejudice, which wider society places on those who are “different”.
Image has a very powerful impact in society and we knew from our experience with social cartography that visual, non-written methods can be a great way to express knowledge. We wanted to give a group of sex workers cameras, so that they could record photographic narratives of their lives, and the lives of the people around them. By revealing their families and their personalities, by letting them express themselves, and by making this content public through a touring exhibition, we could directly respond to the negative imagery society places on sex workers by revealing a very different reality.
When your project won the 2014 Geneva Challenge, what happened next?
Winning the Geneva Challenge was great for us. We used the prize money to fund the project (buying cameras etc.) and to bring the idea to life. It also attracted a lot of media attention, which was vital in exposing the fundamental problem behind the project.
As we collected audio-visual content, we shared it through social media channels (Facebook, Twitter), generating comments and stimulating a public debate around the issues we were seeking to expose.
The final stage of the project has been to organise a photo exhibition, Regias Reveladas, which is currently touring around different Bogota locations.
What success has the project had?
It has empowered the women who were involved to become leaders within their community. Once they realised that they had a legitimate voice within society, we saw how they were transformed from shy, passive victims into activists who were capable of changing their situation.
By bringing them into contact with people they’d previously been cut off from, we built bridges connecting them with wider society. The numbers of people positively impacted by the project continues to grow.
What happens next for the three of you?
María Adelaida is working at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington DC. Catalina and Laura have set up Parces (Twitter @parcesong) as an NGO to defend the human rights of vulnerable populations – the homeless, prisoners, the LGBT community, sex workers etc. Laura is working as an assistant researcher at Los Andes University and a teacher at a local school. Catalina is directing a Social Justice Centre for young activists at a local school and is finishing her master's thesis in psychology at Los Andes University.