Empower girls in Niger for change via education

Our girl empowerment program has many facets including promoting an entrepreneurial culture. The most important step to fostering such a culture is to teach our girls to question since this is something that does not come naturally to them. In their families and at home, they are not encouraged to question. Instead they are encouraged to comply without questioning anything or anyone. Yet, the essence of entrepreneurship is the habit of asking why and then coming up with a better solution.

Our program’s initiative has nothing to do with changing the national curriculum, but everything to do with strengthening the manner in which the curriculum is taught and bringing the content to practical life. The goal is to make our girls think as opposed to merely memorize and execute. We want them to be able to do something useful with the information and knowledge they receive at school.

We put a few questions to the Home Economics teacher about promoting an entrepreneurial mindset and this is what she had to say.

So work, resilience, and creativity are important? Yes, you have to keep on working regardless of mentalities and taboos. We need more female success stories!

More women helping one another? Yes, because when some girls succeed, they don’t necessarily want to help other girls! We need to break this jealousy barrier if we want to really move forward.

Do the girls want to become entrepreneurs?Absolutely! They really want the change to happen in their lives.

What about gender inequalities? Education of women is the key and also how we women educate our sons. We have to bring up our sons differently, to teach them equality at home in a concrete way. As women, it is our responsibility to change our sons’ mentalities. Yet, very often we demand gender equality at our work places, but at home we are not even aware of the fact that we are bringing our sons up the old way, the way our mothers and grandmothers did!!!

Admittedly, not every one of the girls we sponsor will become an entrepreneur, however the characteristics of entrepreneurship – problem solving, action orientation, creativity, being socially-conscious and responsible – are important for their everyday lives. Hence the target of our girls’ empowering program is to see all of our girls employable, studying further, or equipped to start their own businesses in the future. We are counting on your generous donations no matter how big or small to help us do that!

Thank you for joining us and supporting the development of this great program for such a worthy cause!