HAPPY INTERNATIONAL DAY OF THE GIRL 2022! We’re commemorating the day by launching our annual fundraiser in support of girls’ education and skills-building!

Please join us to help provide much-needed support over the coming year. Every bit counts!

Over the last few years, our grant project partners have been working extremely hard to get ahead of an onslaught of tough challenges due to COVID-19 and severe political instability in their countries. And while there are definite successes to report, there is still much to do to get things back on track.

PROJECT UPDATES

• Girls Gotta Run Foundation 

In Ethiopia, where GGRF operates, only about 25% of girls go to secondary school. Far fewer graduate and just a tiny fraction go on to tertiary education. Child marriage, where girls are married off before age 18 (often right when they hit puberty) continues to be a serious problem. Once a girl is married, her access to education and peer networks ceases, and motherhood follows soon after despite the girl still being a child herself.

GGRF’s mission – through athletics and life skills – is to increase the number of girls in school, while also increasing their self-confidence, access to economic assets, and control over life choices. Because of the pandemic and political conflict, continuing regular programming has been especially hard. However, through sheer perseverance and the hiring of new, dedicated staff, work is getting back to full strength.

Over 160 adolescent girls receive scholarships which provide tuition, school lunches, school uniforms and hygiene supplies, running kits, life-skills education, and access to showers and laundry. New girls are being added to the programme for the 2022/2023 school year, with a focus on girls who lost out because schools were closed during the pandemic.

Since its launch in 2014, 95% of girls who completed the programme have avoided early marriage (before 18 or before completing secondary school). And a significant number have gone on to college and tertiary vocational studies. We hope to support GGRF to assist alumni to continue with their studies and give back by becoming life-skills mentors to the younger girls.

• Code to Inspire

The upheaval and turmoil In Afghanistan caused by the seizure of power by the Taliban in 2021 continues to disrupt the lives of millions of women and girls living there. Secondary schools for girls remain closed.

After the Taliban took over in Herat in August 2021, CtI was forced to cease operations and figure out how to adapt to the unsafe and highly volatile situation. In October, the entire coding and graphic design curriculum was moved online using Google classroom. After assessing students’ needs and technical capabilities, laptops were provided to girls who needed them, along with monthly internet subscriptions so all students could continue their online classes. 

Through our flash fundraising appeal in Sept-Oct last year, we were immensely grateful to all our donors for helping to provide $12000 in urgent funds to CtI to help meet their students’ and families’ immediate needs during the crisis, which included food, medicine, rent assistance and internet access. Today, 80% of CtI’s students are on track to complete their classes using Google classroom.

Through unrelenting persistence, and never giving up hope, CtI finally just received permission to renew its work permit, meaning that the coding school can legally reopen. For 2023, this means that a new graphic design class can be held for 180 girls and young women as a one-year afterschool programme (tertiary level only). We hope to support CtI with a grant to roll out this class, purchase new equipment and furniture for the school, and subsidize internet costs.