Girls Must

The confidence gap for girls is global and in Uganda that gap translates to missed opportunities for social and economic growth. Many exceptional girls and young women in Uganda lack opportunities to access their full potential. These girls are too often defined by their communities and traditional norms rather than by who they could become as individuals. Girls Must works to inspire these girls to become leaders in creating the change they want to see in their lives and communities.

Through storytelling as a tool for empowerment and other resources, Girls Must website enables girls who wouldn’t otherwise have an opportunity for mentorship, to have access to resources and success stories of successful women (role models) on their path to empowerment. Through these stories, girls gain self-knowledge, confidence and draw from experiences of other girls and women to shift their mindsets, turn skills into action, and fulfill their potential.

The confidence gap for girls is global and in Uganda that gap translates
to missed opportunities for social and economic growth. Many exceptional girls and young women in Uganda lack opportunities to access their full potential. These girls are too often defined by their communities and traditional norms rather than by who they could become as individuals.

The confidence gap for girls and women in Uganda is growing reason being that most girls who are fortunate enough to enroll in secondary school face significant financial, cultural, and environmental challenges that undermine their ability to make the most of the secondary school opportunity. As a result, young women rarely complete secondary school or don’t perform well enough to qualify for university. Once they reach the workforce, women are much less likely to occupy leadership positions, and they earn significantly less than their male counterparts. Obstacles to finishing secondary school include poverty (88%), pregnancy (60%), and early marriage (55%). When a girl drops out of school, not only is her healthy adolescent development and transition into productive adulthood impacted, but she is exposed to challenges she is ill-equipped to overcome.

Girls Must is addressing the problem through its website with a unique approach that has been designed to embrace the growing and innovative technologies in social media and digital media to help girls in Uganda recognize and claim the power of their voices, their stories, their rights and their ability to achieve their dreams despite the obstacles they may face by encouraging and supporting storytelling as a tool for empowerment.

The website is a one stop resource center of self help resources about different topics, success stories, podcasts, videos of real life experiences by girls and women. Through these stories, girls draw from experiences of other women and girls to shift their mindsets, turn skills into action, and fulfill their potential.

We believe that when women & girls share their stories of personal triumph, they often find that telling their story is itself an act of self-empowerment. And then others are inspired and changed by reading real stories of overcoming struggles with fear, with lapses of confidence, or with cultural norms. Sharing stories of personal triumph has the potential to give hope, to inspire, and to help change lives.

The solution serves girls and young women who wouldn’t otherwise have an opportunity to attend a leadership class, career guidance or any sort of mentorship.

Our solution intends to increase the number of poor girls and young women (14 to 24 yrs) from marginalized communities and schools who participate in informal learning by creating a free online platform that connects them with self-help resources like videos, real life stories, inspirational role models and much more. Our goal is to help more girls and women make confident and informed decisions about their next steps in life no matter what challenges they are currently going through.

Storytelling was one of the first communication strategies used by mankind and is still used in a variety of cultures to pass down traditions, customs, and memories. Stories can have a powerful and inspiring effect on a person, if applied in a purposeful manner. It is through this method that Girls Must draws its approach but rather delivered online to break location barriers and make inspirational stories and resources accessible to every girl and young women whose lives we intend to positively change.

Through a unique and innovative approach our website has been designed to embrace the growing and innovative technologies in social media and digital media to help girls in Uganda recognize and claim the power of their voices, their stories, their rights and their ability to achieve their dreams despite the obstacles they may face by encouraging and supporting storytelling as a tool for empowerment.

Unlike "Girls and Women Lead Global" who uses the power of story telling through documentary film to inspire individuals across the world to act with their communities and transform their lives by showing the documentaries to a class of young women or gathrings, Girls Must uploads the documentaries along with other empowerment resources on it's website to be accessed beyond a classroom and give a chance to other girls and women to access the website at any time of convenience through their mobile phones or computers in community centers.

Our website runs on Wordpress CMS one of the most used content management systems (CMS) on the web. It is developed with PHP a language that is widely used to develop web applications. Wordpress integrates well with already existing online video-sharing platforms like youtube, vimeo etc and different social media platforms that we use to widely share resources on our website.

WordPress is an online, open source website creation tool written in

PHP. It is most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today.

WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world and is used by nearly 75 million websites. It is believed that WordPress powers more than 25% of the world's websites.

For example, famous blogs like Mashable and TechCrunch are both on WordPress. News outlets like The New York Times’ blogs and CNN’s on-air personality blogs all use WordPress, too.

Activitie:

E-Learning, mentorship and resources: Online activities, success stories and information resources like videos and podcasts teaching knowledge and skills about education, life and careers

Output:

• Young women and girls understand and articulate their own situation and feel able to ask for help
• Young women and girls understand opportunities, feel motivated and that their situation is changeable
• Young women and girls have improved self-esteem and are ambitious about their future
• Young women and girls are realistic about their own ability and feel in control of their future

Outcome

• Growth in mindset: believing your abilities can be developed through hard work.
• Hope: setting specific goals, and having the flexibility and motivation to achieve them.
• Self-efficacy: having confidence and knowing your strengths.
• Coping: dealing with difficulties in a positive way.
• Human capital: learning specific knowledge and skills.
• Social capital: knowing people to turn to for advice and support.

Impact

• Young women and girls are able to make informed and confident decision about their future
• Young people fulfill their potential e.g. progress to higher education, pursue their dream careers

We are currently serving 1500 active girls but we project that we shall serve about 10,000 active girls in the next one year and about 50,000 active girls in five years.

Our website is user friendly and using the technology that is already known to most internet users that are spending most of their valuable time on social media. Our goal is to reach over 10,000 active women and young girls with in the next year. We shall use social media to massively advertise and engage users and attract them to our website.

In the next five years we intend to reach over 200,000 active users through continuous advertising on social media. We shall prepare for this number of users buy stitching to dedicated servers that will be able to support a big number of co-current users. We shall continue to modify the website to cater for the growing number of users so that to maintain the maximum uptime.

We shall also partner with groups providing skills and education, and

integrate our digital skills program, leadership and confidence-building
workshops into their existing programming so that we teach more girls
on how to use computers and their phones on how to access our online
platform.

The biggest barrier in the next one year is limited funds, we currently depend on personal finances to facilitate all our activities which also makes it difficult for us to hire more staff to create more content for our growing audience.

In the next five years, the barriers would be the failure to reach the women and girls who may not be tech-savvy or computer literate and may have a difficult time accessing our website.

For the financial barrier we intend to enhance our fundraising and grant writing efforts to source funds from private companies and for securing
additional funding commitments from new donors. We shall also actively
work to form partnerships with other partners and foundation that share
our vision.

About reaching more girls and training them how to use our platform, we shall partner with groups providing skills and education, and integrate our digital skills program, leadership and confidence-building workshops into their existing programming so that we teach more girls on how to use computers and their phones on how to access our online platform.

None

2 full-time staff and 3 part-time staff

The team leader is a talented writer who is very familiar with the Storytelling for Leadership framework which makes it easy for her to be able to creatively transform different interviews and stories in to inspirational materials that are posted on the website.

The team has an experienced and talented website developer with 7 years of website and software development. He oversees the website and makes sure that it is user friendly and always updated with relevant materials and using the latest technology.

The team has 3 digital marketeers who use their digital marketing skills to make sure the information on the website reaches the right audience through social media and offline marketing in community centers and public libraries.

With those skills the team is well positioned to deliver this solution.

We currently don't partner with any organization

Our key resource is our website girlsmust.org that will need female role models and other girls to share their stories of success, empowerment and personal triumph to inspire other young girls. The website has other self-empowerment resources about different topics like leadership, gender equality, mental health, education etc as well as podcasts, videos and mentorship resources. A lot of funds are needed to maintain our staff and the website platform as well as production of original content like podcasts and videos.

Our intervention aim to empower women and young girls and ensure that they don't just have access to skills and resources, but they also have the self-confidence to turn opportunity into action.

Through our intervention girls will have a Growth in mindset, have Hope, gain Self-efficacy, learn to cope with difficult situations, gain life skills and meet mentors. We measure impact through the number of girls who will testify to have got inspired via our platform to make informed and confident decision about their future and fulfill their potential e.g. progress to higher education, pursue their dream careers.

We shall work hard to enhance our fundraising and grant writing efforts to source funds from donors and for securing additional funding commitments from many other donors.

To complement donations and grants from different partners and
supporters Girls Must a intends to partner and sell our services to groups, organisations and instituations providing skills and education, and integrate our leadership and confidence-building workshops into their existing programming. Girls Must workshops will ensure that women and girls don't just have access to skills and resources, but they also have the self-confidence to turn opportunity into action.

Girls must needs financial support to buy professional equipment to help with creating more quality content like videos and studio quality podcasts. We also want to take advantage of the professional net work of SOLVE like donors and investors and other opportunities that may come along because of our partnership with SOLVE.

We hope to get some financial support so that we can be able to buy professional equipment and be able to produce quality content for our readers. We also need help making our platform known to more young people especially girls and young women but we cannot do this on our own.

We would love to partner with other organizations in the field of gender equality, SRHR, HIV/AIDS and many more working towards women empowerment so that they can use our platform to share their reaserch, findings, experiences and field stories so that we create more content for girls to learn from and draw inspiration.

We are a youth movement using storytelling to empower girls and young

women to become leaders by overcoming fears, doubts and limiting
beliefs. We create powerful content with proven impact on girls’ lives –
from strengthening mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic,
accessing education and leadership opportunities, to reducing child
marriage and gender-based violence.

We are currently low on staff, equipment and other resources, our team will use the Innovation for Women Prize to hire more professional staff and buy more professional equipment to help us produce more quality content and do research to understand what content is best for our growing audience. We also have a lot of resources like podcasts and videos that are stuck in post production due to lack of funds but with Innovation for Women Prize, all these resources will be paid for.