Panama: Lifting families out of poverty and fighting exclusion
Context
Despite the fact that the UNDP classifies Panama as a country with high human development (UNDP 2016), national studies and the World Bank consider Panama to be one of the countries with the highest rate of economic inequality (UNICEF).
Children are the first victims of these inequalities, since 30% of them live in conditions of extreme poverty.
Santa Ana, a historic community adjacent to today's thriving San Felipe district, suffers from years of deep-rooted exclusion. Only 24% of the population have completed high school, and 46% are unemployed. Three quarters of Santa Ana's population earn less than $600 a month, with 40% earning less than $100.
Our work in Panama
Combating the multidimensional causes of poverty: VillageFXB economic and community development project
In 2017, FXB joined the initiative Construire une communauté pour un changement durable - Building Community for Sustainable Change (known as Santa Ana Lidera), which aimed to transform the living conditions of the Santa Ana community in Panama City. The aim was to tackle deep-rooted forms of exclusion through targeted interventions with teenage mothers, low-income women entrepreneurs and poor families, while training community leaders to sustain the impact of these interventions.
As part of this partnership, FXB implemented its VillageFXB poverty reduction methodology for 60 families in the Santa Ana community. This holistic approach was put in place in 1991 to simultaneously tackle the underlying factors of poverty: economic poverty, malnutrition, lack of access to healthcare, lack of access to education in the broadest sense of the term, and unhealthy housing and environment.