For nearly a decade, ROLE Foundation has been working to better the situation of Indonesia’s poor and marginalized women. By improving the education, skills, and self-reliance of disadvantaged women, ROLE believes it can bring lasting change. Through our multiple programs geared towards women’s empowerment, skills education, and healthy environmental practices, we envision a sustainable and fair future for Indonesia’s communities. At the end of the day, ROLE Foundation believes in sustainable development through women’s empowerment. You can learn more here. You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter, too.
Indonesia is a country facing poverty, gender bias, and unequally distributed education as some of the hurdles in its economic development. In Bali’s tourism-driven industry, it is the poor and less educated young women that fall through the cracks.
This poverty is often the reason why Indonesian mothers choose to prioritize educating their sons over their daughters, particularly as they reach middle school age. This pattern creates a gender achievement gap that dramatically affects the futures of young women.
The result is that girls from both rural and urban backgrounds are not equipped for participation in the modern working sector, and are left exposed to highly exploitative labor and the sex-trafficking industry. The conditions faced by these young women cement their position in a cycle of poverty that can last for generations.
This can negatively impact not only the lives of the women involved, but the environment in which they live. Poverty means the use, and often misuse, of natural resources and the environment – including waste disposal.
ROLE found that by promoting empowerment, enhancing skills, and ensuring education, we could break the poverty cycle one girl at a time. Through their self-found empowerment, these disadvantaged women could help Indonesia steer its way towards sustainable development.
Our Bali WISE program provides over 100 impoverished women each year with skills and education in English, IT, hospitality, business skills, and basic work and life skills. The program spans over six months and, through scholarships, ensures that our students incur no costs - they stay on our campus, and have transportation, accommodation, and three meals a day provided. They also receive a small stipend that they can send home to their family, allowing them to continue their studies rather than work in unskilled jobs. With a 90% employment success rate after graduation, our Bali WISE program can break the poverty trap one girl at a time.
Every week, more than 50,000 hotel soaps are thrown away in Bali. The Soap for Hope program not only reduces waste by bleaching, cleaning and reforming new soaps, but also acts as a business for local women working with ROLE Foundation. Soaps are donated to local orphanages or sold in the Foundation’s shop.
In the last seven years, ROLE has taken on several environmental community projects in different areas of Bali. These include recycling programs, beach cleaning, reforestation, shipwreck cleaning and village planning. These programs always include awareness and education!
ROLE was initially created as both a women’s empowerment and environmental not-for-profit community organization geared towards an environmentally sustainable future for Indonesia. After seeing the direct link between gender discriminated poverty and environmental destruction, ROLE had decided to divide its efforts.This is what the Eco Park was a part of! Not only was it the home to our students dormitories, it was ‘Campus 2’ and the home of our environmental endeavours. At the Eco Park, ROLE kept its own plant nursery and composting area to provide specific types of trees for different purposes, such as erosion protection, crop yielding, and nutrient enriching. The park was also the site for education on permaculture, sustainable farming, and nature.
The Eco Park land was a pristine area that ROLE’s students called home. It was a place that combined our values in environment and women’s empowerment.
In the first week of October a boundary dispute began between the legal owners of the Eco-Park land and their neighbours. The dispute began because the land was found to be worth more than previously assumed. The certified lease that ROLE had signed to acquire the land for its Eco Park was found to be filled with bureaucratic loopholes.
Want To Know More About What The Eco Park Did? Click Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl8WlxSwsr4
On October 17th at 8:30pm the family of the neighbouring land set fire to crucial parts of the Eco-Park. The following week the female students were verbally harassed at night by the same people. The following night stones were thrown onto the roof of the dormitories.
The BaliWISE students did not feel safe. On October 28th the 44 students had to relocate to ROLE’s central office in Nusa Dua - makeshift dormitories had to be created. The Eco Park must now be permanently shut down and a new dormitory built and attached to our Nusa Dua main office.
We are still moving on with our cause in empowering and educating Indonesia’s marginalized women, but we need your help to build our dormitory and keep doing our great work!
Your donations will make a difference! With your help we can build a dormitory where the girls are safe, happy, and comfortable!
Where will the money be going? It will help pay for:
- Materials
- Labour
- Transportation
- Walls
- Tiled flooring
- A Leak Proof Roof
- Bunkbeds
- Bathrooms
- The Kitchen
- Electricity, Lighting, and Drainage
- Sheets, mattresses, and other furniture.
- Security grills
