About Us

In Puerto Rico, a female head of household who does not work and who has a family nucleus of three, survives on $11 a day. This amount is a lot lower if we consider that some of these women have PAN as their only income, in which case, it is possible that they survive on $5 a day for each member of their family nucleus.

It is also interesting to note that the number of families headed by women has increased drastically and that, according to demographer Judith Rodríguez, this increase will continue in the coming years. This leads us to look at two additional points that concern us as a society:

The increase in the rates of domestic violence and social violence.
The consequences of maintaining a social sector, important in statistical terms, living in poverty and therefore excluded from the goods and services they need for their full human development and that of their families.

Is Puerto Rico the only country that is obliged to look at this reality? Definitely not. At the international level, organizations as important as the United Nations have expressed that the economic development of women must be part of any effort to eradicate poverty.

Poverty is no longer defined merely as a lack of money, but as a reduced level of ability to self-manage meeting one's own needs. It is also the “insufficient availability of economic resources, of which inadequate personal income is only one possible cause”.

In this way, poverty may have among its causes the insufficiency of goods, public services and access to resources owned and managed by the community, among others. If a person's lack of availability of any of those resources contributes to accelerating basic capacity failures for that person, that person would be considered poor.

That said, and taking into account the little access that our women have to the goods, resources and services they need to develop their capacities, it is necessary to conclude that poverty, as a derivative of the conditions they live in by virtue of their sex, is an evil that we must eradicate as a society and as a country.

To achieve gender equity and, in turn, achieve an adequate balance between the needs of all sectors of our society, we must take a look at our economic development strategies from their needs.

That is why there is Matria…

Poverty is no longer defined merely as a lack of money, but as a reduced level of ability to self-manage meeting one's own needs. It is also the “insufficient availability of economic resources, of which inadequate personal income is only one possible cause”.

In this way, poverty may have among its causes the insufficiency of goods, public services and access to resources owned and managed by the community, among others. If a person's lack of availability of any of those resources contributes to accelerating basic capacity failures for that person, that person would be considered poor.

That said, and taking into account the little access that our women have to the goods, resources and services they need to develop their capacities, it is necessary to conclude that poverty, as a derivative of the conditions they live in by virtue of their sex, is an evil that we must eradicate as a society and as a country.

To achieve gender equity and, in turn, achieve an adequate balance between the needs of all sectors of our society, we must take a look at our economic development strategies from their needs.

That is why there is Matria…