Technical and life skills training for young women in Uganda
Introducing Girls Emerge – an exciting program in partnership with ARUWE in Uganda, designed to break down barriers young women face when entering the working world, through the power of vocational skills training*. Girls Emerge focuses on both technical and life skills training for young women, so they feel equipped and ready for their futures!
*just to make sure we are all on the same page, vocational skills training is training in specific skills for specific types of jobs eg. crafts or trades such as carpentry, sewing or beekeeping!
What is Girls Emerge?
Girls Emerge Uganda supports young women with the opportunity to learn critical skills, through targeted vocational training in safe, girl-friendly spaces, supporting them to find valuable and sustainable work within their communities.
Training takes place across six identified key and emerging Ugandan markets that are safe and ideal for young women: commercial beekeeping, clean energy briquettes and cookstoves, paper products, computer skills, phone repair and baking.
In addition to learning a technical skill, young women are guided through a series of lessons and mentorship on essential life skills, such as financial literacy, leadership, business development and sexual and reproductive health and rights.
Working Women – A Gendered Market Analysis
Before launching Girls Emerge, we undertook some pretty essential research in partnership with Uganda NaNa DEVELOPMENT CONSULTANTS LIMITED and Action for Rural Women’s Empowerment (ARUWE). This took the form of a Gendered Market Analysis (GMA), which helped to identify opportunities and barriers facing young women in Uganda, informing the types of vocational training that the program offers. It's a pretty neat report, and it helps to really understand how and why we do things here at One Girl, as it lays out all of the facts surrounding the need for and intention behind Girls Emerge. Take a read!
Beyond education, we want to help equip girls with tangible skills – that they can take out into the world and use safely and successfully within their communities. With an education AND a skillset – girls can literally achieve anything!
Why is Girls Emerge so incredibly great?
Because Girls Emerge is like no other – it helps young women and girls to learn and grow both personally and professionally, opening up doors, opportunities and pathways to success!
Upon completing their training, women will have all of these wonderful things:
- Increased knowledge and skills to find and maintain sustainable work.
- Leadership skills to make informed decisions about their health, families and future.
- Support and encouragement to pursue sustainable and profitable careers, moving beyond traditional pathways in Uganda.
- An improved understanding of sexual reproductive health and rights, leading to increased agency to make informed choices about their bodies and rights
- Improved confidence and decision making and planning, with positive impacts on health and social well-being for themselves, their children and their families!
Girls Emerge participants, Uganda. March 2019.
Wait, there’s more!
Like most things we do at One Girl, Girls Emerge has some pretty epic goals, beyond the main focus of supporting our incredible participants to be their absolute best selves.
This amazing program also aims to:
- Allows young women and girls to challenge career pathways traditionally shaped by gender.
- Reduce the gender pay gap and break the generational cycle of poverty within families and communities.
- Equip young women with the knowledge and skills to make decisions about themselves and their bodies, becoming advocates for gender equality.
How cool is that?!
