In February 2022, I participated in a missionary exploratory trip to Bangladesh. Before this trip I had traveled extensively for both business and personal reasons. During those trips, I had the opportunity to observe firsthand the challenges faced by individuals in underserved communities, particularly girls and women who were confronted with significant disadvantages. However, I had only observed them from a distance or briefly interacted with them.
Me myself I had all my life traveled all over the world, for both business and pleasure. During those trips I had seen sometimes extreme poverty and had also seen the most disadvantage situation in which girls and women were. But I saw them from the distance or just briefly interacted with them.
But during my trip to Bangladesh the experience was very different. That time I was in the midst of poverty, surrounded by street girls and poor girls with families, that could not afford to finance their daughters’ studies and quite often exercise the marriage arrangement they have made when the girl was very still very young. I saw how some street girls (sometimes below 10 years old) were already in prostitution and how young girls were very often getting married to quite older (at least 10 years older) men. I also saw that many of those girls’ families were quite often unstructured and/or one-parent families, because the mother or the father had died or the mother or father (almost always this one) had run away to become involved in another couple relationship, leaving the family (most often the mother with her children) financially hopeless.
This experience was so intense and left such a profound imprint in myself that, when I came back to Europe, something inside me had changed, I was a different person. Back home I felt the need to act to help those poor girls in Bangladesh to get a proper education and become self-sufficient, no matter what kind of experiences they will have to go through in the future.
So, in June 2022 I started with a Crowfunding initiative to support the education of girls in a street children hostel in Dhaha. Afterwards, several girls from extreme poor rural families (in the Noluakuri area) were introduced to me and I began a one-to-one sponsorship program (one girl – one sponsor) with sponsors being based both in Germany and Spain.
Little by little the number of girls increased and we saw the need to create a formal legal structure to channel the financial help and to more broader and professionally help those girls to continue with their academic studies. This is how the Women’s Empowerment in Bangladesh Association (WEB) was established and officially registered in December 2023.
Since then, we have constantly kept increasing the number of girls and sponsors, which location now equally split between Germany and Spain. We are supporting girls of different ages: some are very young, about 20% of them are getting a university degree or diploma in Dhaka, but most of them are in the critical years in which girls abandon their academic education in Bangladesh (from class 8 to class 12).
The challenge ahead is big, the number of girls that come to us to ask for support keeps increasing and more and more we do try to provide them with advising that goes beyond our financial support. But with the help of God, we will be able to forever change the lives of our sponsored girls and provide them with the empowerment they need to successfully face all their future lives’ challenges.
Everything relies on God’s hands. He is the one that manages everything. We are just the tool He is using to make all this a reality.
“The fruit of silence is prayer.
The fruit of prayer is faith.
The fruit of faith is love.
The fruit of love is service.
The fruit of service is peace..”Saint Theresa of Calcutta
Julia Pérez-Cerezo
President of WEB Association
