Like a Grain of Sand

The notion that an oyster’s pearl is born from a solitary grain of sand has had a magical sense of appeal throughout history.

While the pearl-making process is, in fact, more complex, the underlying concept that even the tiniest and unlikeliest of sources has the power to create miraculous change is fascinating and far from myth.

When Mariela, the mother of a sponsored child in Guatemala, thinks of Unbound’s Agents of Change platform, she thinks of donors’ contributions as grains of sand.

Support for the platform helps unlock the potential within the mothers of children who live in poverty, empowering them to transform their communities using their own ingenuity and a small grant.

“I think that when the [donors] see our project, they should feel good and proud for the grain of sand they have contributed,” said Mariela, who led an Agents of Change infrastructure-related initiative in her community.

Communities all over the world have sought support from Unbound in making improvements to their basic infrastructure. Agents of Change helps communities address those needs.

The grassroots nature of Agents of Change has led to meaningful development in communities in more ways than one.

Why sustainable transport infrastructure is important in reducing poverty

Much of the world’s poor live in rural areas isolated by distance, rough terrain and bodies of water. This limits their access to basic needs such as health care, education, food resources, transportation, job opportunities and more.

According to a study on poverty and sustainable transport commissioned by UN-Habitat and partners, lack of basic infrastructure — in particular, that of paths, trails, bridges and roads — and access to transport services have a clear correlation to low agricultural productivity, poor health and low school enrollment, while isolating the elderly and people with disabilities.

Trails and roads enable safer and faster access to markets and services and make it more likely that service providers, like health workers and teachers, can reach isolated rural areas. Good transport infrastructure, the study said, is a necessary condition for economic growth and a step toward poverty alleviation.

Unbound’s Agents of Change platform was established to allow donors to fund community improvement projects led by local Unbound communities. Community members, typically small groups of mothers of sponsored children, draft a project proposal for access to an Agents of Change grant. Once approved, funds go directly to the group, and they use them for such things as neighborhood safety initiatives, creating better access to clean water and health care, improving classrooms or strengthening transport infrastructure, among others.

To date, more than 1,800 Agents of Change initiatives have been funded. More than half of those were infrastructure improvement projects to create or strengthen local roads, walking paths, stairways or bridges.

Pritha Hariharan, Unbound’s vice president of international programs, said this is because many of the families where Unbound works do not have access to paved roads, adequate bridges or solid stairs.

“Oftentimes, this means something as simple as a heavy rainfall could cause dangerous situations for families,” Hariharan said. “Families living in these communities have the capacity to identify and solve their own problems; typically what they lack is the funding to get started.”

Support from Agents of Change helps them get started. Simply having the opportunity to solve their own problems empowers them to believe in their ability to create change.

Across the three regions of the world where Unbound works, this truth is evident within the changemakers who have led initiatives to improve local roads, stairways or bridges — sufficiently connecting their communities to others and opening up their families to opportunities for economic development.

The path toward connecting communities to drive change

The Agents of Change platform was meant to be a strong catalyst to empower communities in poverty to take an active role in their own development instead of waiting for external parties to solve their issues.

In Tanzania, Rehema and her community had already been waiting for years for their local government to repair a main road and access bridge when they learned about Agents of Change.

The main road and bridge into their community was damaged and practically unusable, especially during times of rain when floodwaters would overtake the road, obstructing traffic and flowing into nearby residential areas. To get to schools and the hospital on one side of the bridge, pedestrians — often schoolchildren — had to find alternate routes, usually being forced to traverse private property.

According to Rehema, who is the mother of sponsored child Karim, the local government had been promising for years that that they would fix the road and bridge. The Agents of Change initiative empowered Rehema’s community to take matters into their own hands.

Rehema’s Unbound mothers group joined forces with another mothers group. When each group was awarded an Agents of Change grant, they combined their funds, vetted the labor for the project, and had the road and bridge fixed in just one week.

The updated road and bridge cut travel time from 30 minutes to 10 minutes for people trying to reach the community and hospital, benefiting both sponsored and non-sponsored families. In addition, the improvements allowed for products to more easily be brought into the community, and new tenants have been attracted to the once empty rental properties along the roadway.

In Unbound’s Quezon program in the Philippines, Nida, mother of sponsored child Meynard, led an Agents of Change initiative to make improvements to an integral stairway in her community that had become a safety issue.

In Nida’s community, around 200 residents use a stairway that cuts through a ravine. The original stairway was made of dirt and was steep and narrow, allowing only one person to pass at a time. In addition, the 30 steps themselves were narrow, creating a muddy slipping hazard when it rained. There was no handrail to break a fall and no lighting at night.

According to Nida, children and elderly were constantly falling on the old stairway, which was more like a ladder than stairs, and one student fell to her death when climbing at night in the rain.

Nida and her mothers group used their Agents of Change grant to purchase materials and hire an experienced welder. Then fathers in the community volunteered to construct the new stairs. The entire process took just three days.

The fathers widened and covered more than 20 stairs in concrete, while the welder created and installed a handrail. Now pedestrians can easily pass on the stairs as they make their way to school, the nearby grocery store or homes.

“Not only are the residents given the privilege to experience the benefits of this project, but also other people from other areas who are passing here,” Nida said. “The stairway and handrail project gives comfort to all of us here.”

Nida and her mothers group have hopes of writing another Agents of Change proposal for funding to install solar-powered lights along the stairway, creating even safer infrastructure for their community.

Initiatives that empower mothers to drive lasting change

One long-term hope of the Agents of Change platform is that it would provide a safe space where women — specifically, the mothers of sponsored children — could begin to view themselves as people who are capable of making a positive impact in their communities.

After six years in practice, the platform has made this hope a reality, but it also goes further. It changes the mother participants at their core, challenging what they may have once believed — or have been taught since childhood — about women’s roles in their societies.

Mariela’s experience in her Guatemalan community is a perfect example.

According to USAID, Guatemalan society can still be characterized today as having a “patriarchal and machista (male chauvinist) structure” that often excludes women and other marginalized groups. This manifests as gender gaps across a variety of sectors and public services. For example, women in Guatemala tend to run fewer businesses, own less property and have greater difficulty entering the formal labor market than men.

Mariela’s upbringing was different, however. The youngest of seven siblings who were mostly boys, Mariela’s father brought her up as equal to the boys.

“He did not have the mindset of ‘since you are a woman, you stay at home, and if you are a man, you go to the mountains,’” said Mariela, now 35. “I would go with my father to load an oxcart that he had … and then we would plow and drag the land.”

Still, when Mariela’s mothers group was awarded an Agents of Change grant to build a covered bus stop and bench near a school in their community, she struggled with feelings of inadequacy at leading the task as a woman.

“At first, you don’t think you are capable,” Mariela said. “But you have to fight for things. The truth is that I never imagined it (that she would lead an effort like Agents of Change). We are always used to being told what to do.”

Before the initiative, the bus stop was a crowded corner where the community’s residents stood to wait for the bus to carry them to the center of the city. With no covering, residents were frequently exposed to the elements.

Besides the $500 Agents of Change grant the mothers group received, they sold flowers and organized raffles to raise additional funds for the construction of the bus stop waiting area. They approached a hardware store to donate sand and cement for the project. To save on labor costs, the women worked with a brick mason to do the construction themselves and painted the backdrop to the bus stop.

With the cover and bench seat completed, the new waiting area provides comfort and shelter for residents, and Mariela and the other mothers learned to believe in themselves.

“I tell the other mothers, ‘You can do things with your hands; there is no need for a man. If we can’t bear to carry (heavy things), we can do it little by little,” Mariela said.

“It is something motivating because we are realizing what we are capable of.”

Connecting supporters to specific Agents of Change initiatives

According to Hariharan, in 2023, Unbound has seen an uptick from mothers groups on requests for Agents of Change initiatives that help solve for the effects of climate change, such as digging wells for access to groundwater or paving roads and building bridges to make transportation easier. The needs of a community, and the basis for their Agents of Change proposals, are highly dependent on the region and their most pressing concerns at a given point.

Unbound is already building the next phase of the platform. Soon, it will have the technology infrastructure in place that will be able to connect individual donors with individual Agents of Change initiatives, allowing them to fund the specific types of initiatives that are closest to their hearts.

For each Agents of Change cause funded — each “grain of sand” contributed, as Mariela called it — a changemaker will find the courage to step forth and create a future that benefits the many.

If you’d like to support a small-scale, local solution to reducing poverty in the communities where Unbound families live, learn more about Agents of Change and the initiatives you could help fund today.

Henry Flores, Oscar Tuch, Nickson Ateku, Teejay Cabrera, Danika Wolf and Erin Coleman contributed photos and information for this story.