Speeches Shim
Helping youth become more involved in improving their communities is a major part of USAID’s SolucionES violence prevention project in El Salvador.
Douglas Cruz is a 21-year-old resident of San Martin, El Salvador. Since he was a little boy he has helped his mother, his greatest role-model, with her business. A quiet young man, he always had difficulty attending school because of his family’s limited resources. Although he is optimistic and has many goals, he had trouble discovering all of his abilities.
Unity is strength: SolucionES reaches out to private sector to increase social investment in violence prevention.
Xiomara Guadalupe Rivas, 15, does not hesitate when saying: “I’m happy because of the Girls Club.” Xiomara lives just outside of San Vicente, a major city east of San Salvador, in a community where the local school only goes up to 6th grade. When she graduated, she wished to continue with her studies, but her parents decided she should stay home.
As part of SolucionES intervention in preventing violence, community organizations strengthen their bonds.
In Reparto Los Angeles, a community located in San Martin, El Salvador, people live surrounded by violence; gangs proclaim their territory, the community lives in fear, and murder is not a rare occurrence.
A radical change needed to happen in order to strengthen this community and to create public spaces to coexist and interact peacefully.
USAID’s $24.8 million Crime and Violence Prevention Project helps increase citizen safety in 33 municipalities throughout El Salvador. The project supports the Salvadoran government’s National Crime and Violence Prevention Strategy and municipal-led prevention plans to reduce crime and violence in targeted high-crime communities.
El Salvador is the third largest economy in Central America, and the most densely populated, with 6.2 million mainly urban inhabitants. In the years following the end of the civil war in 1992, El Salvador made significant democratic advances, including successive free and fair elections. While the democratic transition has been accompanied by significant, social and economic progress and social indicators such as infant mortality rates and literacy have improved, poverty and inequality of opportunity have increased as problems.
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