Olympics for Poverty Elimination: Activating youth to lift their families out of poverty
The Poverty Stoplight Olympics is an educational program developed by Fundación Paraguaya that involves young students. The program consists of students using the Poverty Stoplight survey to determine the current situation of their families. After this, students become responsible for implementing good practices and attitudes in their households. These changes allow the families to generate positive behavior and new habits to eliminate multidimensional poverty. Through the use of games and challenges, the Poverty Stoplight Olympics seek to awaken young students’ entrepreneurial spirits and empower them as agents of change in their families.
Through the application of the Poverty Stoplight survey, families can discover their strengths and weaknesses and then work on five specific poverty indicators. Students and their families take on the challenge of turning their “red lights” (indicating extreme poverty) to “greens” (indicating no poverty) and collecting evidence of their achievements to win at the Poverty Stoplight Olympic Games.
In 2016, Lorena Rojas participated in the Poverty Stoplight Olympics as part of the representative team for the Technical College and Vocational Training Center of Villarrica, department of Guaira. She says that participating in this competition was one of the best experiences of her life because the Poverty Stoplight Olympics managed to change her way of thinking and how she related to others. During the course of the competition, she had the opportunity to develop skills in areas that were previously undeveloped. She says that thanks to the different activities she completed with her peers she was able to acquired knowledge on topics such as budgeting, saving, and entrepreneurship, as well as learning how to work collaboratively with a team. The Olympics created the right environment for her to learn how to handle all kinds of challenges while cooperating with others. Additionally, it encouraged Lorena to do new things, such as raising awareness among relatives and students from other courses. She considers this to be her most important achievement.
In order to accomplish this, Lorena and her team carried out workshops with children of lower grades that sought to raise awareness on the importance of financial education. They also prepared games centered on the use of money, which helped children understand the basics of savings. “It was very difficult at the beginning. We didn’t know where to start or what we were facing” Lorena said. However, little by little her team became more confident and they began to increase their support for each other. Thanks to this, Lorena learned that one of the most important factors in a competition is cooperation amongst teammates.
Thanks to the Poverty Stoplight Olympics they themselves also learned about poverty elimination tools.”These are habits so simple that sometimes we still find it hard to apply them to our lives,” Lorena said. “After finishing the Poverty Stoplight Olympics, I understood the real impact it had in my life. Even now I apply the poverty elimination tools we learned, like budgeting, and I will continue to apply them in the future, since they are very important.”
Lorena thanked the Poverty Stoplight for this competition and the opportunity to encourage young people to give their opinions to feel more empowered about their lives, their families and their communities. “Young people can also understand and undertake actions to eliminate poverty,” Lorena said. “And in this way we can contribute more to society.”
