School director Bertha Sanabria with students

The Estelí Women's School works to improve the lives of low-income women in Estelí and rural areas of northern Nicaragua through integral education including academic  studies aong with workshops on life-skills, health care and gender. Many of  our students are single mothers with the majority being workers in Estelí's tobacco industry. Our program enables them to finish their secondary education quickly so as to get a better job or else to go on to further education

The school offers a modular baccalaureate program for adult students. In 2019 the Ministry of Education in Managua decentralized the program and changed the duration from two years to four years. Just over 60 women students get support with scholarships and study on the women's only weekday night classes. Our school is the only center authorized to impart this baccalaureate program in Estelí. The school consistently has the best results in the country for this adult baccalaureate program. Our women students get free transport to their barrio each night for their safety.

Students from one of the school's choral programmes

The Sones Segovianos music school provides music education to around 65 children in the municipality of Estelí.

The project also gives dance classes to over 30 young students as well as art classes to over 20 children. Almost all the students are from low-income families.

Sones Segovianos is certified by the Nicaraguan Institute of Culture to offer classes both in singing and in a wide variety of instruments.

ICES sychologist Karen Villarreyna with children in Isidrillo

The foundation's Intervention, Change and Education Service (ICES) works to address the issue of domestic violence in and around Estelí.

The program maintains a women's shelter and counseling to individual women and families as well as educational outreach activities in local rural communities participating in the foundation's programmes, as well as the women students in the Cooperative´s education programs.

ICES  is staffed by a psychologist and a lawyer with support from social work interns in their final year at university.

Dr. Peter Loewinthan and Dr. Katy Mimno
see a young patient on a medical delegation

The foundation's community health programme organizes weekly workshops and talks on preventive health care in communities and barrios and preventive health care for over 350 children in low-income communities.
The project also gives support with medicines and laboratory tests for cases of people in hardship and monitors program participants with chronic conditions like diabetes or high blood pressure.

Every year the programme organizes a three week long medical delegation supported by the Dorchester House Multi Service Center in Boston, USA which is closely coordinated with the local Ministry of Health (MINSA).

We also facilitate a dental health program for children from low income families carried out for MINSA by the Boston University Henry s. Goldman School of Dental Medicine caring for over 800 children in preschools in the city of Estelí.

Solar panel workshop

We provide skills training of various kinds mainly for women and adolescents.

We offer training in,
Periodically we also organize workshops on the cultivation of useful plants for family gardens, on the theory and installation of solar energy systems and on the installation and use of ecological toilets.