GiST Safe Space (GSS) project

Graduating as one of the top in her class, Jennifer Agunloye, a creative writer and social development expert passionate about empowering marginalized women and girls, left her promising career immediately after her undergraduate studies to establish an initiative that will enable vulnerable women in her community access opportunities and overcome poverty.

Trained in the university of Nebraska Lincoln, under the Mandela Washington Fellowship and the Lagos business school, She has worked fully time as the founder and team lead of Girls Should Thrive Initiative for over 4years, directly impacting the lives of more than 3,000 women and girls.

She is also an award winning writer using movies to tell the stories of vulnerable families and has won multiple awards including the American Globe award for her movie "make room" which tells the story of the effect of insurgency on girls and women.

This project is focused on addressing issues affecting vulnerable girls. This includes

1. Early marriage
2. Rape and sexual abuse
3. Teenage pregnancy
4. Maternal death
5. Poor self esteem.
6. Idleness
7. Illetracy
These issues will be addressed a virtual and physical community based safe space where:
1. These girls can freely speak up about these issues
2. They will be linked with mentors who will develop a one on one relationship with them to help them walk through these processes.
3. Be trained on how to start up businesses, market their product and access
funds.
4. Be exposed to opportunities available for them to go to school and gain
education.
When a woman is empowered, educated and financially stable, she not only going to raise healthier children but she will also have a strong voice
within her community which will help give other girls a better chance.

Over 50% of teenage girls within this community end up either dropping out of school, pregnantant or hooked on drugs before their 18th birthday.

This occurs largely due the lack of information about opportunities available to them to succeed as well as access to mentors and women they can model their lives after.

According to the 2017 School Crime Supplement (National Center for
Education Statistics and Bureau of Justice) and Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey

54% of females aged 13-19 are sexually harrased ,sometimes gang raped and mostly mislead into having unsafe sexual affairs
Also 33% of females within this age range are mostly secondary school dropouts or and O level due to poor funding or quests by parents and
guidancece for them to get married and 65% of female within this age range tend to have a low self-esteem as regards to changes occurring in the body during this period.

The GiST safe space project (GSS project) is a 3 months program where 50 girls will be trained on:
1. Leadership development
2. Developing a healthy self esteem.
3. How to protect themselves from sexual abuse.
4. Sexual and reproductive health.
5. Opportunities available to get educated.
6. How to start up a business.
7. How to use the internet for personal and career development.

This training will hold for 5 hours a week (physically and virtually) after which they will all be paired with 10 mentors (5 girls to 1 mentor) who take them one on one session for 3 months meeting once a week to discuss their progress and other challenges.

Brigade community is a slum wit

Most of these girls who suffer the challenges mentioned above are people with great potentials and ability to bring about different levels of change in their communities but are not given the opportuinity because of illetracy. This leaves them unable to compete with their peers in urban settlements and hence disadvantaged in life. Our training will offer them the opportunity to operate on a level playing field with their peers.

In 2017 after my undergraduate studies, I returned back to the community where I had my secondary school education (Brigade) and I found out that most of the girls I went to school with did not further their education even though they had the potential to be amazing things. Most of them were married with kids and suffering hunger and malnutrition while others were either single parents resulting from sexual abuse or unplanned relationships or completely hooked on hard drugs.

I began to research and ask questions and I realized that most of these would
have been avoided if these girls were meaningful engaged at some point or if the had someone to talk to who would have pointed them in the right direction and exposed them to opportunities available to make a life for themselves despite the challenges they faced.
This is what inspired me to create a safe space where these girls can be taken in over a period of time and take through a mind transforming journey where they come out with a zeal and a drive to beat all the odds and become all they want to be.

The death of 18 year old Shamsiyya at the point of delivery will make this project to always be at the core of my heart.
After we had started this project and taken on our first set of girls, it was a very challenging journey and we couldn’t give it all or required because of the lack of funds.
Shamsiyya who suffered from sexual abuse and very low self esteem got
pregnant. She as rejected by her parents and the man responsible and was
homeless for most part of the pregnancy and began to suffer from hight blood pressure and other related illnesses. Unfortunately we were not aware of this because she didn’t have a means to communicate with us till she died at the point of delivery.
The news of her passing hit me so hard and since I made a resolve to give all I can to ensure all of these girls have a safe space to be when the challenges of life hit and they have no where to go.

Having lived with these girls and interacted with them on different levels. I have first hand knowledge of the problem and how it affects each one of them.
Also as a trained and experienced writer, I have learned how to communicate and get them to tell their stories in a way the external bodies can fully understand what they go through and what they need.
Apart from having a passion that stems from the core of my soul to see vulnerable young girls become change makers, I have over 7 years experience in the social sector starting off as a volunteer with Wisdom foundation for 3 years and starting off on my own in 2017.
I have also been trained by prestigious organizations including the University of Nebraska Lincoln where I was trained as a civic leader and the Lagos Business School IN non profit leadership development.
I’m also 2017 African Change maker and a 2018 Mandela Washington fellow and a 2019 semifinalist at the Atlas Corps fellowship.
Apart from my expertise I’m also working with a team of industry experts
including Data Analysts, Financial experts and other non profit business
developers who are a part of our management team at GiST.

After the death of Shamsiyya I was devastated and discouraged. I questioned my ability to lead the team and bring the lasting change I wanted to see. I took time off everything and spent a few weeks crying and asking questions. I didn’t think I had what it took to help these girls.
But in the midst of that I still couldn’t shake off the fact that there were still so many girls who need us, who were counting on us to help them survive the tough challenges of life.
I thought of 17 year old Patience who was also pregnant at that time and was
about to be married off because her family couldn’t cater for her.
I knew that instead of allowing the death of Shamsiyya to discourage me, I have to let it inspire me to do better, to look at what needed to be adjusted, to strategize and try again.
This was when we came up with the idea to not only have it as a physical safe space but also virtual so that we can reach these girls from anywhere even when being physically present seems impossible.

Being a creative writer, one of the strategies we have used to scale up our impact is inspiring women and girls across the globe by telling stories through movies.
In 2016 after winning the Homevida/Google award, I got the opportunity to pitch a story I had been working on about the effect of terrorism on girls and women in Northern Nigeria. 

They were willing to make it if I could produce an excellent script.
I went into intense research, interacting one on one with stakeholders and
community members who had been affected by the crisis at that time but being of a different religion, despite being a known face in the community I was met with a lot of religious resistance that was even life threatening when I was chased out of the community on one occasion with a Knife.

This was supposed to make me give up on this community but after a session with my mentor I realize that my approach was wrong. I wasn't approaching them as stakeholders and partners who can contribute to the project. I changed my approach and the movie was shot in 2017 and has gone on to win many awards.

Most of the approaches being applied in this part of the world involves training the girls on different hands on skill to help them start off businesses. As noble as this cause is, it fails to address the psychological and mental challenges that these girls have to deal with.

From our surveys we have realized that once a girl is empowered mentally it becomes easier for her to thrive in other areas including business. 

Having the safe space online as well as offline helps us to continue to be effective even in the face of challenges that limit you for being able to be physically present at the communities for example COVID 19 pandemic that recently placed the world on lockdown.

Our theory of change focuses on mental empowerments leading to long term impact.

Our project currently has 20 girls enrolled. We are aiming to scale up to 50 in the coming cycle.

Our goal is to have reached 1000 girls in 5 years.

In the next one year our goal is to reach 100 girls in 2 cycles of 50 girls each.

By 2025 we would have trained 1000 girls.

One of our major challenges would me lack of enough members on our team to see the process through. We would need to bring on 2 more full time staff to serve as program coordinators.

We are making a pull for volunteers who will intern with us over the next 3 months after which we will select those who we will take on as full time staffs.

World Connect Inc.

Our business model is still being developed.

For financial sustainability we have established a social enterprise to farm and package readily consumed food for sale. The proceeds from this organization will be used to support the safe space project.

Our major source of funding presently is crowd funding. This has worked for us over the years as we have been able to generate over $20,000 from crowd funding alone

We continue to reach out to our partners and donor individuals to support our work.

$102,000

One of the major things lacking is visibility for our work. Winning the elevation prize will not only help scale up our impact through funding but more importantly help to provide a platform for more exposure as well as give more credibility to what we do.

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Malala Foundation.

UN women.

Rodenberry Foundation