Our Female Empowerment initiatives inspire primary school girls from some of the most faraway communities in Madagascar and Zambia to believe in their self-worth. We aim to increase the number of primary school girls who successfully transition to, and eventually complete, secondary school. Specifically, the programme objective is to see 70% of female beneficiaries achieve high enough exam scores to advance to top boarding schools. These schools not only have better resources than local government day schools, but they also provide an environment of serious academic concentration and shelter girls from the domestic expectations of their homes and communities. For our 2019 cohorts of girls, we recorded 42% of girls transition to secondary school; however, for the girls who remained in the programme for three consecutive years, this figure skyrocketed to 100%. This realisation prompted us to re-strategise and limit intake to girls in grade 5 only, mandating a three-year commitment to the programme.

The programme consists of weekly clubs with 151 girls across 9 schools, and we focus our activities on building self-esteem, literacy and overall academic performance. In 2021, we expanded our Female Empowerment Programme to include women from our communities who dropped out of school. Most of these women were forced to abandon their educations due to unplanned, early pregnancies and marriages. In the first half of 2023, after hundreds of hours of lessons on financial literacy, business management, English literacy, marketing, healthy relationships, and sexual education, and post-successful submission of business proposals, the women in South Luangwa and Lower Zambezi received grants to put their newfound knowledge to use. For the remainder of the year, we monitored the women’s progress towards their profit targets, offered supplementary support when required and celebrated their personal and professional successes.