When she was eight, Lisa Padua lost everything after her father died, forcing her to leave school in her mid-teens to work as a maid in Qatar and then in Singapore.
Twenty-one years later, she still works in Singapore as a domestic helper, but now owns three businesses and earns enough to send six nephews and nieces to college in the Philippines.
Padua says she owes her success to Aidha, a micro school in Singapore that trains women like her in wealth and business management so they can build a better future back home.
Aidha offers a nine-month course for S$350 (US$280) that emphasizes computer, communication and financial skills. The three-hour classes run two Sundays a month to accommodate the days off of the women who work as maids, nannies and caregivers to the old and ill. Ambitious students can then take a more intense nine-month module that helps them launch their businesses.
“This journey of transformation allows them to stand up by themselves financially,” Aidha executive director Veronica Gamez said.
Gamez, who holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and worked at Credit Suisse and Boston Consulting Group, uses her experience to make the modules practical for the real world.
Saving for the future is the crux of the course.
The biggest challenge in breaking the cycle of poverty is finding a productive use for the money the women send home, Gamez said.
At least 211,000 foreign domestic helpers work in tiny, wealthy Singapore for between S$300 and S$600 a month. Taiwan and Hong Kong also have large concentrations of these women.
The money they send home is modest on a personal scale, but the overall remittances from hundreds of thousands of women working abroad are enormous, ploughing billions of dollars into the economies of the Philippines, Indonesia and Myanmar. Directing those funds into entrepreneurial projects can have an even bigger multiplier effect for developing countries, especially in rural areas.
In villages like the one where Padua grew up, farms without funds are left barren and abandoned, and people are left without work. However, the farm Padua bought using her savings is now managed by her brother. They employ up to 18 farm hands, providing her neighbors with jobs and income. Padua also rents out a house to families and invested in a friend’s business that delivers frozen food to local shops.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘UNWAVERING ALLIANCE’: The US Department of State said that China’s actions during military drills with Russia were not conducive to regional peace and stability The US on Tuesday criticized China over alleged radar deployments against Japanese military aircraft during a training exercise last week, while Tokyo and Seoul yesterday scrambled jets after Chinese and Russian military aircraft conducted joint patrols near the two countries. The incidents came after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi triggered a dispute with Beijing last month with her remarks on how Tokyo might react to a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan. “China’s actions are not conducive to regional peace and stability,” a US Department of State spokesperson said late on Tuesday, referring to the radar incident. “The US-Japan alliance is stronger and more
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS