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East African Girls' Leadership Summit
The Challenge: Adolescent girls face many barriers to staying in school, including poverty, climate change, gender inequality, sexual violence, teen-pregnancy, and child marriage, making them less likely to finish their schooling. While the impact of girls’ education is significant for the girl, her family, the environment, and countries, there are limited supports to girls that help them navigate the barriers and stay in school.
Our Model:
After completing 15 months of leadership development in their Sauti ya Dada circles, each circle creates a preliminary advocacy plan to address a critical barrier to girls’ education in their community.
Each circle nominates girls to represent them at the East African Girls’ Leadership Summit
At the Summit, girl representatives gain advocacy skills, learn about climate justice, and consider how to apply these skills and knowledge into their advocacy plans. They present their advocacy plans to the group and are able to receive feedback and insight from peers, SYD alum, and other young women leaders.
Following the Summit, the representatives share what they have learned, recommendations to strengthen their Creative Advocacy Practicums (CAP) plan, and the circle finalizes the CAP plan.
Selected SYD alum will return to EAGLS the following year to showcase their completed CAPS and inspire the next cohort of SYD leaders.
Impact:
Leading the way for climate justice: Climate change impacts all corners of the world, but it disproportionately impacts girls and women. 74% of girls in our program noticed changes in weather patterns in their community due to climate change but few knew the causes, how gender inequality exacerbates the impacts, or that girls have an important role to play in solutions. By the end of EAGLS, where climate justice was a focus:
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95% understood what climate change is and what causes it
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97% knew that gender inequality exacerbates the impacts of climate change on women and girls
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96% know that women and girls have an important role to play in addressing climate change
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96% of girls report being better equipped to advocate for change in their communities.*
*During EAGLS, girl leaders gain deeper skills in advocacy which they can use during their Creative Advocacy Practicum. By the end of EAGLS, 96% of girls report knowing how to use specific creative advocacy tools, and know there are many ways to advocate for issues they care about - from climate change to teen pregnancy - at the community, country, and global level.
Watch the video below to learn more about this year's Summit:
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