In the weeks since our Poverty is Sexist report launched, I’ve found myself reflecting on some of the statistics included on those pages: A woman in Sierra Leone is 183 times more likely to die in childbirth than a woman in Switzerland. 39,000 girls become child brides every day. In least developed countries, average literacy among women is only two-thirds the rate of men. Together, data points like these can provide a compelling case for why investing in women and girls is so essential if we hope to reduce gender inequality and extreme poverty.
But sometimes, I worry that the phrase “empowering women and girls” is both so broad and so vague that it starts to feel empty. I hear the skeptic in my head saying “sure, that sounds nice—but what does it really mean in practice?”
Fortunately, when that skepticism creeps in, I have photos from my most recent trip to Rwanda to remind me of what a specific effort to empower girls looks like, up close and personal.
I visited a program called Girl Hub, whose mission is to enable the country’s one million adolescent girls to fulfil their potential. Girl Hub’s work is so important—even in a place like Rwanda, where nearly two-thirds of Parliamentarians are women—because many girls still face worse health outcomes, educational opportunities, and employment prospects than their male peers.
As we filed into the back row of a quiet school building on a Saturday afternoon, we watched as a group of young girls participated in a weekly educational program, called 12+, a Ministry of Health mentorship and safe space initiative for girls aged 10-12. Created with support from Girl Hub Rwanda and three implementing partners, the initiative aims to ensure that girls are informed decision makers during the difficult transition into puberty.
We were told by one of the leaders that many of these girls were specifically chosen for the program because they had come from particularly vulnerable families or communities. And yet in that school room they stood tall, acting out skits, volunteering opinions, and racing to demonstrate what they had been learning.
We also watched them receive the newest edition of Ni Nyampinga. Ni Nyampinga (which in Kinyarwanda means “the beautiful girl – inside and out – who makes good decisions”) is a quarterly magazine, a weekly radio show, and a digital platform that delivers critical tools and information to girls. The girls in the program become ambassadors and distributors of the magazines, getting more than 100,000 copies out to some of their peers all across the country. Everything about these magazines, from the color scheme and design to the advice columnists and female celebrities interviewed, brought me back to my own days as a middle school student more likely to turn to peers and magazines than my parents with the tough questions of adolescence.
All of us left the schoolroom feeling uplifted, buoyed by the enthusiasm of the girls as they interacted confidently with their mentors and shared visions for their own futures. I have no doubt that I’ve captured girls in these pictures who will grow up healthy and become Rwanda’s future nurses, engineers, pilots, and Parliamentarians.
