Category: Women

What do you do when the pandemic has wiped out your livelihood and you don’t know where your next meal is coming from? For Robina from Aklan, it is to keep on going and even find more ways to serve other people in these tough times. When tough times get tougher Even before the pandemic,...

Because of the pandemic, distance learning has been the norm for all the students in the Philippines. While this has kept children safe from the COVID-19 virus, parents had to bear most of the responsibility for their kid’s education. To help ultra-poor families, ICM has partnered with the Department of Education for our Family Academy...

Here in ICM, we have found that one of the best ways to promote economic growth among the poor is to empower women for greater productivity. In fact, 88% of our Transform participants are women. So it’s no coincidence that most of the stories that we have featured in our newsletters and social media are...

  We often say that a savings group can act as a safety net for when its ultra-poor members are facing emergencies. Janice in Dipolog lived this out when she and her family found themselves living in a pigpen. When Janice first joined Transform in 2017, she wasn’t so sure about the livelihood lessons. Wives...

Week after week, month after month, COVID-19 forced Rhodora and her family of nine to stay at home. Problems threatened to overwhelm them. Rhodora’s husband lost his job. Food was scarce. The fear of the virus was always with them. “It is only by God’s grace that we survived,” Rhodora shared, thinking back over the...

Janeth is 29 years old and she lives in a bamboo house in a mountainous region in Dipolog. She is a mother of three children, and her husband works as a rubber tree farmer. His job brings in approximately PHP17 per person per day; that’s less than HK$3 or 30 US cents. Thinking that Transform...

Widowed and living with her two children and three grandchildren, Dolores had every excuse to lose hope. Only she and her son had jobs, and even with their combined income, they only had PHP19 (USD 0.40) a day per person to cover their daily expenses. But instead of faltering, she persevered and now her story...

Bless understood what it meant to live in poverty from an early age. At the time of her birth, her parents didn’t even have a permanent home and were forced to move from place to place, staying with members of the church her father pastored. This is a common story. Many pastors who minister in...

Melmar took a huge leap for love when she married Clino and moved away to Zamboanga more than thousand kilometers away from her hometown in Bicol. She had met her husband while working in Manila, fallen in love, married and eventually moved to Clino’s hometown. But the storybook ending started to unravel when the couple’s...

  Tell us a little about yourself. My name is Zara Denham, and I’m 17 years old, currently doing the IB programme at French International School of Hong Kong. I’ve been volunteering at ICM since last October. How did you first get involved with ICM? I got involved with ICM through school. My school connects...