For girls who grow up in rural Africa, poor school attendance during adolescence is correlated with advanced sexual initiation, earlier marriage and childbearing, higher rates of HIV and AIDS, and greater risk of domestic violence.
As adolescent girls transition from childhood to motherhood, uneducated women are less likely to value learning, to be aware of the returns of schooling and ultimately to ensure that their children receive an education, making it more challenging for them to break the cycle of poverty.
Our Response
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 122 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 2024, we reached a significant milestone with the completion of the activities for the first cohorts of Community Women in the South Luangwa and Lower Zambezi. After receiving their grants in 2023, the 12 women who successfully completed the programme recorded remarkable growth in their household incomes, with the average monthly income improving by 272%. The women have credited this change to their improved knowledge base after undergoing three years of comprehensive financial literacy and business management training. We carefully documented their stories and our own lessons learned to provide a foundation for future programme development. This process culminated in the creation of detailed training manuals, ensuring that the best practices from the first cohorts will be effectively streamlined for the benefit of future participants.