Designing a Scholarship Programme for Women in Huila

A scholarship sounds like a simple thing: someone pays the fees, someone else studies. Anyone who has worked on rural education will tell you that fees are rarely the binding constraint, and that a programme designed around tuition alone will produce a nice announcement and very little change.

The Phoenix Initiative is currently designing a scholarship programme for women in Huila as part of its education and training pillar. Nothing has been awarded. No cohort has been selected. This article describes a design in progress, published early so that it can be argued with while it is still possible to change it.

What follows is therefore a set of intentions and a set of constraints — not a report on results, because there are none yet.

Why scholarships rather than donations

The foundation's education pillar rests on a preference that is worth stating openly: a transferable skill outlasts a transfer of money. A grant solves this month. A trade solves a decade, and can be taught onward.

That preference is already visible in the Initiative's existing work in artisan baking and viennoiserie — a craft chosen precisely because it is demanding, portable and genuinely employable. A woman who can laminate dough properly holds something no one can take back from her, and something she can teach to the next person in her town.

The scholarship programme being drafted extends that logic. It is designed around recognised, employable qualifications rather than short awareness courses, and around trades where Huila already has demand: hospitality and food service, agro-processing, tourism, and the technical roles that a growing regional economy will need.

The barriers that are not tuition

Colombia is not short of training capacity. SENA, the national learning service, offers vocational programmes at no cost to the student across the country, including in hospitality and agriculture. If free training already exists, the obvious question is what a scholarship is actually for.

The answer is everything around the course.

• Transport. A course is free until you have to reach it. For a woman in a rural vereda, the daily cost and time of getting to Neiva or Pitalito is often the whole obstacle.
• Care work. National time-use data in Colombia consistently shows women carrying the large majority of unpaid domestic and care work. A training schedule that ignores this quietly excludes the women it claims to target.
• Opportunity cost. Hours in a classroom are hours not earning. For a household running close to the line, that is not a philosophical problem; it is a reason to drop out in week three.
• Materials and tools. Trades need equipment. A baking course without flour to practise with at home is a course you cannot practise.

The programme being designed therefore treats the stipend, the transport allowance, the childcare arrangement and the tool kit as the core of the scholarship, not as extras attached to it.

How candidates are intended to be selected

Selection is where scholarship programmes usually reveal what they really value. Two commitments are being written into the design.

The first is that selection will not run on academic ranking alone. Prior schooling is a measure of the opportunities a woman has already had, and using it as the main filter reliably funds the already-advantaged. The intended criteria weight motivation, the concrete plan for what the qualification will be used for, and whether the barriers above are the thing standing in the way.

The second is that selection will be done with local participation, not from a desk. The foundation is based in Huila and intends to work through the institutions already embedded there — schools, municipal offices, producer associations — on the reasoning that people who live in a community are better at identifying who will use an opportunity than any outsider reading application forms.

What the programme will deliberately not do

Some of the strongest design decisions are refusals.

The scholarship will not require recipients to work at Phoenix Oasis. It would be easy to build a pipeline that quietly converts a charitable programme into cheap recruitment, and the foundation intends to keep the two separate. A woman who trains on a foundation scholarship and then takes a better offer in Neiva has not failed the programme; she has demonstrated it works.

It will not be a one-week course with a photograph at the end. Short interventions are cheap, look good and rarely change an income.

And it will not publish beneficiaries' stories as marketing. If and when there are graduates, what they choose to share will be theirs to decide.

Defining success before starting

Perhaps the most useful discipline in a programme like this is to write down, in advance, what would count as failure — because it is much harder to do so afterwards.

The measures being drafted are unglamorous and deliberately hard: how many women who start actually finish; how many hold a related job or a running business a year after finishing; how many report that the barrier that once stopped them is still solved. Not how many people attended a launch.

Those numbers do not exist. They cannot exist yet — no scholarship has been awarded, and the first cohort has not been chosen. Publishing the criteria now is the point: it makes the programme accountable to something specific once it starts.

Phoenix Oasis opens on 30 June 2028, and the foundation's work in Huila is designed to run alongside it rather than wait for it. If you want to understand how this scholarship fits into the wider mission, the Phoenix Initiative sets out all three pillars.