Salvadoran women join Donor Direct Action
Seeking international support for their work to fight brutality against women in El Salvador, ORMUSA is eager to have greater access to individual donors who can support their work through online contributions to Donor Direct Action.
Joining Donor Direct Action’s other partners – in countries as diverse as Afghanistan and South Africa, Nepal and Nigeria, Syria and Latvia – ORMUSA is part of the global effort to end violence and discrimination against women.
Gender-based violence is endemic in El Salvador, the country with the highest murder rate in the world and a cultural tradition of machismo that is instrumental in achieving this dubious honor.
In El Salvador, a woman is murdered every 15 hours. Often they are killed in a vicious manner, their bodies mutilated and tortured solely to inflict pain. Ending a relationship, seeking a divorce or even getting married are all reasons why women are murdered in El Salvador. The men who carry out these murders know they will probably get away with it.
But change is coming to El Salvador, thanks to the work of feminists such as those at ORMUSA. ORMUSA helped draft a law that came into effect in 2012 making femicide – the deliberate murder of women just because they are women – a criminal category in El Salvador and establishing special provisions to protect women from gender-based violence. But despite legal protections, 75% of femicide cases still end up never being prosecuted.
Now ORMUSA has access to individual donors around the world who can help support their work to stop violence and end impunity in El Salvador through online contributions to their US tax-exempt partner organization, Donor Direct Action.
The need is great: only a tiny fraction of official government aid goes directly to women’s rights organizations and even that small amount is decreasing. The majority of women’s organizations have very small budgets, often less than $25,000 a year, according to the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). Such limited access to funding weakens women’s organizations and impedes their ability to sustain their impact.