What is the initiative and where is it implemented (city or country, for example)?
Girl MOVE is a Grassroots Leadership Academy that creates innovative models of education to amplify talent, raise gender equality and promote sustainable transformation. The Academy's goal is to empower the next generation of changemakers through a mentorship model to sustain impactful change. By investing in women and girls, the Academy supports their empowerment.
Girl MOVE Academy is a winner of the 2021 UNESCO Prize for Girls' and Women's Education.
How was the initiative established? How was it implemented?
Based on sisterhood circles, Girl MOVE Academy offers three types of programmes entitled CHANGE, LEAD, and BELIEVE.
CHANGE offers women graduates training in leadership skills and prepares them to design impact-driven careers. The Academy reports the significant success of the programme – an over 80 per cent employability rate among the programme’s graduates after three months.
LEAD is designed for active university students facing a challenging turning point in their lives. An impressive 90 per cent of the programme’s participants progress in their studies or obtain a degree with a defined personal and professional plan.
BELIEVE supports girls in the seventh grade (aged between 12 and 15) in progression to secondary school by making them believe in the power of their dreams. By completing the Academy’s programme, the transition rate from primary to secondary school is 88 per cent, in contrast with 30 per cent in national statistics.
Which stakeholders are involved in the design and/or implementation of the initiative? Which sectors do they represent?
Girl MOVE Academy collaborates with various international organizations, including World Food Programme, Global Fund for Women (as project investors), various corporate sponsors, lab partners, academic partners, institutional and impact partners.
What are the impacts of the initiative in terms of facilitating lifelong learning? Who does it benefit and how?
The Academy offers numerous on- and offline initiatives that empower girls and women with flexible paths and accommodate group needs based on geographic location and access to resources.
Sisterhood Circles
Girl MOVE Academy promotes new female reference models and their dissemination with sisterhood circles that expand and impact the community.
Girl MOVE Digital Academy transcends the barriers of offline communication. The online learning portal offers open access to learning materials and other resources to sustain efficiency and change.
CHANGE
Change is an intensive one-year programme designed to empower women and build confidence in their potential. It helps participants formulate tangible goals leading to an impactful career. The programme enrols women aged between 20 and 30 years with Bachelor or Master’s degrees.
LEAD
Lead is designed for university students approaching a decisive stage in their personal and professional lives. The programme helps participants build confidence and establish a clear vision and mission to embrace challenges. By the end of the programme, with the help of the mentorship system, participants can develop an effective career plan aligned with their personal and professional goals.
BELIEVE
Believe is a programme for young girls aged between 12 and 16 years (adolescents, known as Mwarusis in the local dialect) approaching secondary school. Girls living in vulnerable conditions in remote and rural areas are often indecisive about enrolling in secondary school. This age is often associated with a high school dropout rate due to forced marriages or early pregnancies. In this programme, Mwarusis receive support from the university students in the LEAD programme and young women graduates of CHANGE in sisterhood circles. These circles promote trust bonds and role models so that these young girls develop self-confidence, become aware of their potential to impact the surrounding community, and design the plan to make their ambitious dreams come true. The goal is for the girls to enrol in secondary school at the end of the programme year with a more structured plan for their life and studies.
Girl MOVE Academy created Changemaker LAB to test and validate ideas, turning them into effective solutions for real people making an impact on the planet and humanity with their talent, energy, and creativity. The Changemaker LAB is built on three pillars:
- mapping challenges;
- defining benchmarks;
- developing and delivering prototyping and efficient solutions.
In collaboration with various companies and organizations, the LAB is mapping challenges and identifying potential partners to assemble LAB working groups. LAB kick-starts the discourse around the co-creation of solutions by benchmarking and defining challenges. The process is enriched by specialist inputs, field visits and prototyping plans. The final stage tests the prototypes and delivers detailed feedback, which is particularly helpful at the project pilot stage and when developing systematic replicability and scalability criteria.
References
Girl MOVE Academy. 2021. Our programs. [Online] s.l., Girl MOVE Academy. Available at: https://www.girlmove.org/ [Accessed 11 November 2021].