Women

Combating poverty, ensuring peace and preserving the environment: These are the three major concerns of Austrian Development Agency (ADA), the operational unit of Austrian Development Cooperation. Every year, about 600 projects and programmes are implemented and funds of well over EUR 100 million are deployed to improve living conditions in developing countries.

Together with the Federal Ministry for Europe, Integration and Foreign Affairs (MFA), partner countries, public institutions, civil-society organisations and businesses, ADA seeks to ensure that sustainable development works to the benefit of all people in Africa, Asia, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe as well as in the Caribbean. Personnel in 13 coordination offices make sure that ADA operations are in line with national development goals and the needs of the local population and that funds are put to the best possible use.

MFA allocates the ADA budget, but other federal ministries and donors or the EU, for example, draw on ADA expertise. Since 2008, the Austrian Development Agency has been conducting programmes for the European Commission. Via a further financing instrument, business partnerships, it allocates private funds for development cooperation: ADA promotes projects of enterprises in developing countries and emerging nations if they contribute to improving the conditions of life of the population in a region. Most funds are invested in its key regions and priority countries.

Help for Women in Africa, Asia and Latin America

The Marie Schlei Association was founded in 1984 in memory of Marie Schlei, the former German Minister for Development Policy. According to the statutes of this non-profit association, its objectives are "to promote cooperation with poor women, women's groups and organizations, to help educate and train women, to provide information about the causes of poverty and injustice and to promote equal rights for women. We inform the public about the situation of these women in order to raise and increase awareness as well as a feeling of responsibility and the willingness to help the women and therefore all people in the developing countries."

The Marie Schlei Association encourages women to create self-help projects. In the past two decades, about 300 projects have been successfully carried out in 45 different countries, from Argentina to Zimbabwe. All projects were planned and realized by local women's groups and organizations. In order for projects to be successful, the following criteria must be met: time schedules and curricula have to be adjusted to the women's daily routine. The projects have to be effective and applicable to everyday life in order to make the additional work bearable for the women. Cooking, child care, household chores, getting water and heating material – project work adds additional work to their daily responsibilities. Nevertheless, these women want and need these projects, since they offer them the only possible access to education and training and thus to their own income. Our female partners are responsible for "their projects and the management of the material required. The solidarity among women they experience also creates an atmosphere of partnership and mutual cooperation. The Marie Schlei Association works for equal opportunities and justice.

The Afro-Asian Institute Salzburg (AAI) is a non-profit organisation with close ties to the university of Salzburg. It is financed by the public funds and the Catholic Church. The aims of the AAI are to provide educational services on development policy, to enable intercultural encounters and to promote interfaith dialogue.
The AAI is a meeting place for different cultures and religions. We show different global contexts through a varied educational and cultural program in order to raise awareness of injustices and set out development policy issues and its risks in the context of globalization. Affected individuals, as well as experts from the global South have an opportunity in our organization to take the floor. Within the framework of the AAI scholarship program, students from African, Asian and Latin American countries receive financial support, as well as a personal accompaniment and take part in our educational program.

Labor union

The association AFGHAN e. V. supports medical care, handcraft and education in Afghanistan since 2002. We have realized many projects in Afghanistan supporting schools and universities as well. The association consists of expert members such as journalists, med. doctors and engineers.

Daara.de is a project of the alliance “Eine Welt Schleswig-Holstein e. V.” Teachers and employees of nursery schools and youth facilities can find educational work support like consultants, teaching materials and agency in finding classrooms for their developing-political educational work.

Daara.de wants to

• make learning at school a good experience,
• increase the value of the developing-political education in Schleswig-Holstein,
• attract the interest of children and teenagers for “Eine Welt” and provide the ability to look at situations and problems in a worldwide and comprehensive connection.

The Program “Arbeit in Würde“ supports and accompanies Brücke • Le pont with 35 development projects for  discriminated for people in the countries Togo, Benin, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Bolivia and Brazil.

Education and support of the independency are the foundations of a sustainable development. People should be able to make a living from their work and to take responsibility for family and society. They need profitable or fairly paid work and just working conditions for it.For that they need profitable or fairly paid jobs and just working conditions for it.

Brücke • Le pont have been focusing on the following points:

• Income support
• Professional education
• Support of labour laws

The projects promote mainly adults, but also teenagers and children. They contribute to the parents so that they can take care of their children, and promote the equal rights of woman and man. Brücke • Le pont works mostly together with small and local organizations. They are close to the target population and know the social, cultural and political relations on site very well. Brücke • Le pont thinks highly of the fact that in the projects participative and locally adapted methods are being applied and that the cooperation is maintained on networks. This creates synergies and raises the effectiveness. Education is the foundation of development. It strengthens the self-esteem of the people and provides the necessary knowledge for them to perform a good and profitable work.

The Federation for Social Defence (German: Bund für Soziale Verteidigung, BSV) is an independent, non-governmental organisation based in Minden, Germany, that unites people and organisations of pacifist and antimilitarist conviction. The BSV was founded in 1989 as an umbrella organisation to promote social defence and other alternatives to the military, and to work for total disarmament. Its creation was the result of a big conference on social or civilian-based defence held in Minden, Germany, a year earlier. Currently, we actively support civil rights groups in Belarus and Ukraine, are engaged in advocacy work to promote the concept of Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping (UCP), and seek to counter the militarization of youth in (German) schools through peace education.

Creative workshop "A Step Into Growth" (NGO) is founded in 1995 in the town of Valjevo (Serbia, ex-YU). Our main aim is to stimulate and help develop various potentials and skills of pre-school (P/S) and school (S) children (with problems and without problems in psychomotor development), adolescents and grown-ups , the re-socialization of children and adolescents and their reintegration into the social and natural environments, optimization of communication of grown-ups in their family or professional environments with the help of a group of experts (psychologists, lawyers, a special pedagogue, a teacher of English, artists, musicians, an art history teacher, a PE teacher, a psychiatrist...).

Activities mentioned so far referred to the rights of the children passing through normal psycho-motor development who enjoy the rights to supplementary education, to the special education for the children with special needs, to the right of children to a supplementary health care, to the right of children to play and integrate into the social environment and the right of children to take part in social activities of the locality.