At age 15, Mercy Marilu, known by friends as a bookworm, planned to attend college and dreamed one day of teaching as a professor. But at 18, she was forced to put her dreams on hold for something far less glamorous— selling roast chicken on a dusty street corner in Huaycan, a province on the eastern outskirts of Lima, Peru. Strapped for cash and struggling to support two other children, Mercy’s parents could no longer financially support their daughter and expected her to immediately contribute to the family income.
Two hours from Mercy’s home in San Juan de Lurigancho, a municipality in the Cono Norte area of Lima, lives Milagros Risco Jayo, another Peruvian woman familiar with putting dreams on hold. Three years ago Milagros enrolled in a local university with the hope of completing her five-year university degree in business administration. Two semesters into college, guilt ridden by watching her single mother support three children and run the family store alone, she dropped out and opted instead for a short certificate program in aerobics. Applying her natural entrepreneurial spirit, Milagros initiated a successful mini-aerobics course, offering friends and neighbors classes in her home kitchen for two soles per hour– a modest amount, but the needed extra to help her mother. According to Milagros, continuing her college degree seemed too “selfish.”
Milagros and her mother in their family store in San Juan de Lurigancho.
Burdened with daily economic survival and essential short-term needs, women like Mercy and Milagros do not have the luxury of making a long-term investment in higher education, even if it offers a more secure and economically sustainable future. While the high cost of college is a burden for all Peruvian students, it is women who bear a disproportionate burden of the responsibility of attending to the immediate needs of their families. Even if low-income Peruvian women have money to cover the costs of tuition, societal norms pressure them to prioritize their families’ daily economic needs over their own educational goals.
Mercy points out that Peru’s pervasive culture of machismo and sexism creates an additional barrier for women who dare to dream big about their education. Pressure to marry and have children early makes it impossible for women to prioritize their own education. Convincing skeptical husbands and fathers who perceive higher education as a detraction from familial responsibilities is often a losing battle for young women.
Peruvian girls in a local secondary school. In Peru, only six percent of women finish their college degree.
It is for these reasons that less than six percent of women in Peru finish college. But now, Mercy, 27, and Milagros, 24, are giving higher education a second shot. With their newly received Vittana loans, Mercy and Milagros have the freedom to invest in longer-term goals without sacrificing their monthly contributions to their families.
Milagros, now enrolled in a three-year technical school for nursing, plans to trade in her spandex for a stethoscope. She is using her Vittana loan to pay for a complementary course in English in the hopes that she will be hired as a nurse at a downtown clinic working with foreigners. When she’s not in class, Milagros continues to help her mother with the family store and teaches an occasional aerobics class to cover the cost of books or transportation.
Mercy and her four-year old daughter. Mercy is using her Vittana loan to study early elementary education and earn income to contribute to a college savings account for her daughter.
Mercy, relieved to be away from the corner chicken stand, is using her Vittana loan to study elementary education. Although Mercy won’t ever be a professor as she had once dreamed, she has a new dream— to make a private, five-year university a real possibility for her four-year old daughter. This time, Mercy has already put the dream into action— last week, she opened a savings account in her daughter’s name.
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