Empowering Adolescent Girls

The government of Rwanda set out a bold and ambitious agenda to achieve middle-income status by the year 2020. However, at most levels of society, women remain distinctly vulnerable due to a variety of factors, including low literacy rates, low secondary school completion rate, high rates of domestic violence, and lower earnings and economic opportunities than men. The sharp differentiation in treatment, expectations, opportunities, and access to resources for adolescent girls during childhood and adolescence shapes their life trajectories in numerous ways. Just as adolescent boys are given more freedom and opportunity, the lives of adolescent girls become more constrained and confined in terms of opportunity, resources, mobility, and life choices. As a result, adolescent girls are stuck in a cycle that reinforces a life of poverty, stress, and limitation. This is particularly so in the northern and western districts of Rwanda, where Firelight’s CBO grantee-partners were located. Communities in this region have been impacted not only by the genocide, HIV, and acute poverty, but also by instability at the borders with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda. Our aim with this grantee cluster has been to build the capacity these local community-based organizations to run and document effective, replicable, and potentially scalable holistic girls’ empowerment programs that will support vulnerable young women and shift their economic, educational, and social outcomes in the long-term. Of the six grantee-partners we also supported Action pour le Développement du Peuple (ADEPE) to be a Community Grantmaker to the other five, building their capacity to support the other smaller. We have been working with ADEPE to focus on strengthening the capacity of the smaller CBOs in girl-centered programming and in organizational development areas such as financial management and monitoring and evaluation.