Girls’ Education and Empowerment

Empowering girls with life skills, education, and sisterhood is vital for them to become thriving women. Every year a girl goes to school can increase her future income by 10 percent, according to UNICEF. Girls’ education is also associated with improved health outcomes, such as accessing pre- and postnatal care, and with increased levels of freedom and mobility. Yet even before the pandemic shuttered schools across the globe, an estimated 130 million adolescent girls worldwide were out of school. Ensuring that girls become educated is a multifaceted undertaking, requiring community, school, and parental engagement and the ability to empower girls with the knowledge they need to keep themselves healthy and safe.

Our Girls’ Education and Empowerment Lab area explores how best to empower girls to grow into strong women. Our partners focus on keeping girls in school, arming them with the knowledge, skills, and resources they need, engaging boys and men as partners in girls’ empowerment, training educators in gender-sensitive teaching, and encouraging leadership among girls and young women.

Girls’ Education and Empowerment Lab partners had the opportunity, pre-pandemic, to come together for an in-person retreat, where they shared their work, learned from each other, and forged a common learning agenda; since COVID-19 struck, although their convenings have only been virtual, pairs of partners have demonstrated their grit and resilience by jointly leading a successful webinar for their peers and co-creating learning products. 

To learn more about our Girls’ Education and Empowerment Learning Lab, contact us at [email protected].

Strong Girls Make Strong Women Handbook

WomenStrong International has seen the power of groups and the importance of life skills education in empowering girls and young women to thrive socially, physically, and financially. Strong Girls Make Strong Women: A Practical Handbook to Creating and Leading a Girls’ Club was developed in partnership with WomenStrong founding members in Ghana, Kenya, India, and Haiti, based on their experiences running Girls’ Clubs for over 10,000 girls and boys. Our Handbook incorporates best practices promoted by renowned youth development and life skills education specialists worldwide. Download our Strong Girls Make Strong Women Handbook here, and learn more about the difference it can make in your community.