Non-profit that empowers rural Chinese women through education celebrated in portraits of some of those it has helped
- A charity founded by a Chinese Canadian has funded the education of more than 1,400 women in rural China, some from families earning just US$400 a year
- Photographer Olivia Martin-McGuire helped Educating Girls of Rural China celebrate its 15th anniversary by shooting portraits of women it helped
Daisy Gong was raised in a poor family in the small, remote mountainous village of Aganzhen, in Gansu province, northwest China. The eldest of three children, she grew up planting lily bulbs with her mother.
She started school aged five, walking an hour each way. “When I started high school, my mother would give me 15 to 20 yuan to eat for the whole week. Sometimes she had to borrow the money,” says the 32-year-old by email. “People around me did not think girls should have too much education.”
“I was determined to go to university,” says Gong. In 2008, she was accepted by Hubei University of Economics to study nutrition science. At the same time she met Ching Tien, a Canadian citizen who grew up in China, and who founded Educating Girls of Rural China (EGRC), a non-profit that empowers young women like Gong through education.
Since 2005, EGRC has sponsored more than 1,400 women through high school and university, with a 100 per cent graduation rate, helped women find employment and lifted their families out of poverty. In rural Gansu, annual per capita income is about US$1,000, only one-seventh that in Beijing or Shanghai. The annual family incomes of some EGRC-sponsored students are as little as US$400-$500, the charity says.
