Colombia: Fighting Poverty · Global Voices

Opened in 1989, the FXB Houses are based on the concept of the Tender Loving Care: the belief that children orphaned, HIV-positive or suffering from AIDS, will have a better and longer life if they are accommodated in a family setting, surrounded by tenderness and receiving appropriate care.

The FXB Houses offered much more than medical care. From babies to teenagers living there, most were orphans or abandoned and could not rely on the support and love of their parents. The team around them had all the medical and human skills necessary for their well-being. The FXB House was their family, the frame of their child's life.

FXB implemented this concept of Tender Loving Care in Colombia, Brazil, Thailand and the United States.

The FXB House in Barranquilla was, at the time, a significant position in the fight against stigma and discrimination against people infected with HIV. It was also an alternative for access to palliative care for young patients.

With the arrival of antiretrovirals on the market and, consequently, the possibility of prolonging the lives of parents, the FXB House has become a day centre, open to the community. It provided services tailored to the needs of children and their families such as nutritional support, medical care and treatment of HIV, psychosocial support, education and out-of-school support, HIV prevention and testing. The reconstruction of the social fabric of orphans who had been reintegrated into their biological families or foster families was an integral part of FXB's mission.

In 2011, FXB Colombia launched a first programme to eradicate poverty VillageFXB in an extremely disadvantaged neighbourhood of Barranquilla. It will then be replicated in another peripheral area of the city and in Bogota. Malnutrition, illness, unsafe housing... The poorest people living there face a variety of complex challenges. Not to mention that the issue of income would have been a mistake! Partial aid, which only targets a cause of poverty, is not enough to overcome it.

Thus, our VillageFXB Economic and Community Development model has enabled us to provide, in three years, a comprehensive response to the root causes of their poverty by simultaneously acting on its predominant factors. The aim was also to combat gender discrimination and to balance relations between men and women so that women, who were more vulnerable to poverty, could access the same economic and social opportunities.