“Right, please don’t look at me, hey!” says 22-year-old Nadia, who’s about to start her routine in front of the other students. She shyly stares at her feet whilst waiting for the music to start, then skilfully starts lifting herself up on the hoop that hangs from the ceiling.

Just 15km from the Iguazú Falls in Misiones lies Fortín Mbororé, a Guaraní settlement of 800 people. As I walk into the community from the main road, along a red dirt track, I feel I couldn’t be further away from the waterfalls and the slick circus of tours that go with them.

Women own only 1% of the world’s titled land and account for 70% of the world’s poor, according to data garnered from the United Nations Development Program. In a recent report prepared for the UN’s High Comissioner on Human Rights, Dr Fareda Banda, professor of law at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, concluded that in spite of the progress made in recent years, women still face discrimination worldwide.

Alpargatas are up there with mate and dulce de leche in the ‘representing Argentina’ stakes. The traditional shoes are worn by Argentines of all shapes, sizes and classes from the Patagonian cordillera to the porteño avenidas.

A survey recently published by Unicef stated that 9.2% of children in Argentina are born to an illiterate or severely undereducated mother. The findings, from their annual study ‘The State of the World’s Children’, seem shocking for a country which supposedly has the highest literacy rate in the continent.

A crowd of indigenous children run laughing through the mud streets of Derqui village, two hours outside Buenos Aires. They scuffle and shout to each other as they throw paper leaflets in the air, watching them tumble in the breeze. But the language of their squabbles is not their parents’ native tongue, the Toba language from the northern province of Chaco – it is Spanish.