Leading with Care: How Women Around the World are Inspiring Businesses, Empowering Communities, and Creating Opportunity

Launching a Solution

When CARE arrived in Chiwe in 2002 to launch its Adult Literacy Education program, Lester, as one of the few educated women of the area, was an obvious choice for a literacy program leader. Despite already spending full days caring for her six children and farming a small tobacco plot alongside her husband, Lester agreed to be a part of this program to teach reading and math in her village. She wanted to help lead this effort because she knew that lack of these basic skills reinforced the cycle of discrimination against women and that education was a critical part of the solution.

Seven years ago, CARE’s literacy assessment discovered that 83 percent of Chiwe residents could not read or write, and only 30 percent of ...