Girls Rights and Empowerment Program

Background

Recognizing the peculiar and unique challenges that girls and young women face including marginalization, abuse and exploitation, DCI-SL implemented specialized programs aimed at addressing violations against girls and young women as well as empowering them to equally exercise their rights and benefit from goods and services of the society. DCI-SL thus implemented two critical programs including 1) The She Leads program in Western Area, Bombali, Bo and Moyamba Districts and 2) the Adolescent Girls Empowerment and Protection project (AGEPP) in Karene district. Implementation of these programs have been driven by critical government policies and legislations including the Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment policy and law, the Sexual Offences Act and other relevant gender laws and policies.

Our impacts: • DCI-SL formed adolescent girls and young women’s groups in 50 communities with a total membership size of over 1000
• Trained local/community-based mentors to be mentoring and providing other support to the girls
• Supported girls and young women to transform their clubs/groups into CSOs and provided funding and training for them to carry out their self-initiated activities and raise more funds to be self-reliant
• Promoted access to education for out of school girls and young women in all the communities of program intervention
• Provided technical and logistics support to 53 schools in order to organize gender socialization sessions and activities that changed negative gender norms into positive ones, including ensuring that girls too can become senior prefects in co-educational schools rather than just being head girls working under the senior prefect
• Formed over 40 Women Action Groups to support socio-economic development of girls’ mentors and other women,
• Trained Basic Literacy and Numeracy Skills facilitators targeting to teach young women functional numeracy and literacy,
• Provide support to Peripheral Health Units and trained community-based health care staff to provide Sexual Reproductive Health Services for girls and young women including first aid medical services for girls and young women who had suffered from rape/sexual penetration and other GBV related injuries that require urgent medical treatment
• Established functional safe spaces in all the 50 communities and both the adolescent girls and their mentors are now using the safe spaces to organise life skills sessions, meetings and mentoring sessions for the adolescent girls.
• Provided school supplies and sanitary kits to address gap in access to basic essential needs and these supplies have motivated and inspired them to be serious and work hard in school.
• Established Village Savings Loan Associations (VSLA) groups and trained them to effectively run the scheme ongoing, monthly radio discussions and training of PHU staff and support with buffer pep kits provided for all health centres.
• Support community-based women's groups to organise cross border meetings that address challenges that Girls and Young women face in accessing education and engaging in trading and other economic
• More girls and women are now in schools and universities as well as holding leadership and political positions in schools, universities, communities and at national level
• Increase in number of active girls’ rights champions and advocates- more girls and young women including those at the community levels have developed greater ability to advocate for or negotiate with political leaders for their rights and community needs
• Political leaders and decision makers are increasingly recognizing the need to be involving girls and women in decision making processes there by engendering diverse opinions in public debates
• Emergence of reliable girl-led groups and organizations that amplify the voice of girls and young women particularly in shaping policies that reflect the aspirations of girls and young women
• More girls and young women are becoming entrepreneurs engaged in diverse form of businesses including those that were perceived masculine and only done by the men