Sixty-three-year-old Rosa Chafla, dressed in a teal sweater and red bayeta (a traditional Ecuadorian shawl), proudly walks up the hill that leads to her granddaughter’s high school. She is carrying a present, because today is graduation day.

Teachers and parents battle strong winds as they finish setting up the stage and chairs in Shuid, a mountainside community more than 12,000 feet above sea-level. The wind carries the faint scent of roasted guinea pig—a clear sign of a celebration to come.

Chafla’s 17-year-old granddaughter, María Belén, is huddled inside a classroom with her fellow graduates to-be, waiting for the ceremony to begin. Chafla takes a seat and waits to watch the first member of her family to ever receive a high school diploma in Shuid’s first-ever high school graduation.

María Belén has lived with her grandmother since her mom died when she was six. When she started primary school in 2007 there weren’t enough classrooms for all the students, and three grades were often squeezed into one room. There was no high school.

Despite this, Chafla was determined that her granddaughter go as far as possible in school. The entrepreneurial farmer decided to use the money from the offspring of the families’ animals—a sheep, bull and donkey—to pay for primary school.

In 2009, WE Charity partnered with Shuid and started to build new classrooms for the primary school, which went up to Grade 6. María Belén steadily inched closer to primary school graduation. But in 2013, when María Belén started Grade 6 (and the final year of primary in Shuid), she and her grandmother started to worry.

Their funds were limited. The nearest high school was a 30-minute drive away. Due to Shuid’s remote location, public buses don’t travel the winding roads up to their village. The few families who could afford high school pooled their resources to pay for a hired van. It would cost Chafla roughly 25 percent of her monthly income to transport her granddaughter to school—not to mention the cost of a uniform, books and food for the day. Going to high school outside the village was too expensive.

Once a teenage girl is forced to end her schooling, her future options are limited in the village. Young women, still girls, are pressured into early marriages as the next-best alternative for financial security, which often results in teenage pregnancy.

In 2013, after seeing what could be accomplished by working with WE Charity, the parents of Shuid decided they wanted—needed—a high school in the community. Building new classrooms for a primary school wasn’t enough. Women, mothers and grandmothers like Chafla, led the campaign. They volunteered their time on the construction site, stopping their normal activities every few days to focus on building the school.

Even with a school in the community, families still needed to budget for high school. Money was tight in Chafla’s household. “I needed money to pay for my clothing, my books and also I wanted to help my grandmother,” María Belén shares. “Then I heard about the girls' club.”

In 2015, the girls' club program started in Shuid. The program, meant to empower and educate girls to stay in school, has an economic component. María Belén was taught how to breed and raise guinea pigs, a delicacy and ancient food source in the Andes, to provide food for her household and a small income that allowed her to stay in school.

“I started with 11 guinea pigs, but then they started reproducing and I had 20, and then 25!” María Belén says, reflecting on her beginnings in the club. She and her grandmother were determined to get her through high school, and decided to combine their efforts in the raising and selling of her newfound herd. Chafla started by selling them in the city market. The first time she tried it, she sold every single one.

Still, it was not ideal to have to travel half an hour by private transport to the nearest city to make a sale. So the enterprising teenager came up with a plan; she talked with the president of the community, the president of the PTA and the principal of the school, and got permission to use the school’s speakers to make an announcement. “Come to my house, I have guinea pigs for sale, 8 USD the big ones, 5 USD the small ones,” blared over the sound system.

People from all around the community started marching into her front yard to buy María Belén’s guinea pigs. “That’s how I started my small business, and every time I had something to sell, I would announce it through the speakers and people would come. That’s how I paid for my studies.”