Thanks to the Morris Family Foundation’s ongoing contribution, we’ve been able to reach even more girls and their families in Sierra Leone with access to life-changing education!
We’re very excited to share with you some amazing results!
We’re so excited to share with you some of the key findings from a recent evaluation of our Business Brains program. Your support helped fund this insightful evaluation, and it meant we were able to see where we were nailing it, and where we could make this program even better.
Spoiler alert: the findings are pretty incredible! And we’ve peppered them throughout this report!
We’re not releasing the full report until International Youth Day on August 12th, so we hope you enjoy this exclusive look into all that we’ve achieved together in the Business Brains program since 2017!
Now for the juicy numbers …
Target 1: By 2030, ensure equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical, vocational and tertiary education, including university.
From July 2018 to June 2019, our Business Brains program ran 2,848 lessons to 8,725 students on livelihoods, business management, sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), menstrual hygiene management (MHM), life skills and career development.
The program is helping girls to set goals, have a clear direction for where they want to go in the future, and develop the confidence to follow through with their plans. For girls in school, the career development portion of the program has helped them to make choices for secondary school based on their passion or skill set (for example, enrolling in science classes if they wanted to be a nurse or doctor).
“We now share with our families what we want to become in life and [it’s] no longer the decision of our parents or friends. Now [we are] confident to choose which stream to enrol [in] and what we want to become in life. We believe that everybody can become successful [they] just need to apply good work and effort.” – Business Brains participant.
Business Brains has given girls a belief in themselves. There was an overwhelming sense of belonging amongst participants. They are now part of a group that is encouraging them to go back to school and finish their education, rather than being marginalised in the community for dropping out or being unable to attend. Many girls commented on their pride in their school uniforms, shoes and bags, and the lessons in self-care (such as with menstrual hygiene) has given them a dignity and sense of value they previously didn’t feel.
There were also multiple accounts of girls who completed the program becoming Head Girls at their schools and speaking out in assemblies as a result of the program and their new revered status.
“I want to be a good example to my friends as I am ahead of others in terms of education.” – Business Brains participant.
Something we already knew (but were excited to see on paper!) is that 122 members of Business Brains Girls’ Clubs — who had previously been forced to drop out of school due to early pregnancy or who never attended school in the first place — returned to school as a result of Business Brains**.Through the income earned by their businesses, they were able to pay for items like school fees, books and materials such as uniforms and shoes, as well as continue to provide for their children and/or parents.
“Some of us have been doing business for the past one year, some seven months and some five weeks. We use the profit to take care of our educational needs: pay school fees, buy books, school bags … and support our parents/families at home.” – Girls Club member.
Target 2: Promote development-oriented policies that support productive activities, decent job creation, entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation, and encourage the formalisation and growth of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises, including access to financial services.
As you know from your last report, we reached this target already!
As part of the sustainability plan for the program, in the first half of 2019 we implemented a new approach – the 45 assigned school focal teachers were trained to actually run the Business Brains lessons in schools themselves. And the Community Volunteer Peer Educators (CVPEs) played a key role in supporting the focal teachers with their new responsibilities.
Including these teachers, we actually equipped a total of 85 new educators with new knowledge and skills!
Teaching participants about financial literacy and savings has proved incredibly successful! About 60% of participants have a savings plan in place and 20% have already saved money from their businesses. The majority (81%) say the training has helped them to establish good work practices, such as writing down business records, rather than remembering customer details by heart**.
The majority of girls who completed Business Brains left feeling optimistic and hopeful about their future. Compared to participants surveyed midway through the program, there was a 21% increase in this feeling by the end of the program. There was also a considerable increase in girls having a greater sense of knowing what they wanted to do in the future (48% increase from participants midway through the program to those who completed it)**.
“I don’t want to be a farmer like my parents. I want to be educated and get a good job, take care of myself, my family and help my community, especially young girls after me.” – Business Brains participant.
It’s clear that the impact of Business Brains is rippling out into the communities where we work and the change is mainly led by the girls in the program who are passing on the benefits. During the impact evaluation, we heard from girls who are supporting their families with money (such as buying lunch for their siblings), helping their mothers with record keeping for their family business and sharing books with their sisters so they could go to school too.
Teresa*** means business. When Teresa was in primary school, she started selling butterscotch and fry cakes to pay for her school fees AND to help support her family. It’s pretty incredible that from such a young age, Teresa has been passionate about her education. And this passion is inspired by her hard-working Mum, who has worked on a family farm since she was a young girl. To Teresa, her mother is her number one role model because despite not having a formal education, everything she has done has been for her children. And one day, Tersea also wants to be a role model for younger girls in her community. She’d like to become a nurse so she can support other young women and save lives.
“I want to be a good example for my friends, and I can, as I am ahead in my education. If I am strong in my education, others will follow me”.
Now at age 20, Teresa is a member of a Girls’ Club within her community – and she’s driven to eventually lead the club when we’re no longer needed to run the program (because of champions just like Teresa!).
***We’ve changed Teresa’s name to protect her identity.
Another incredibly important aspect of our Business Brains program is providing education in sexual and reproductive health and rights, family planning, and menstrual hygiene management (MHM). The MHM component of Business Brains teaches young women and girls about the importance of menstrual hygiene and gives them the confidence to talk about and manage their periods.
Target 3: By 2030, ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health-care services, including for family planning, information and education, and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies and programs.
Previously taboo topics such as menstrual hygiene, safe sex, family planning and discrimination are now being talked about more openly amongst communities engaged in Business Brains. Participants reported going home and talking to their parents about pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases – even encouraging them to use condoms to prevent any unwanted children!
Girls have also been sharing what they’ve learned about menstrual hygiene with their mothers, some even influencing them to the point of getting a latrine in their homes. In fact, 8 out of 10 girls said they felt they had acquired new knowledge about menstrual hygiene thanks to the training through Business Brains**, and members of the Girls’ Clubs said the use of reusable pads is now very common and publicly discussed amongst members.
“I now know about menstruation and how to take care of myself.” – Business Brains participant.
One of the most powerful changes, however, has been girls feeling empowered and knowing their rights when it comes to their own sexual and reproductive health. Some reported taking a stand against ingrained beliefs of how men should treat women and asserting their rights over their own bodies to their partners and families.
“The businesses have made some of us become financially independent and not to rely on our parents and boyfriends for survival and support. This helped free ourselves from teenage/early pregnancy and sexual abuse by our boyfriends.” – Girls’ Club member.
While Business Brains deals with sexual and reproductive health and rights and impresses upon all participants the importance of girls and women having complete autonomy over her own body, it does not directly deal with sexual or gender-based violence. Yet considering the extremely high rates of sexual violence — in February 2019, the President of Sierra Leone, Julius Maada Bio, declared a national emergency due to the high rates of rape of female minors — and its link with girls’ education and rights, it’s become evident that we need to make this a key component of the program.
We’re not ones to sit idly by when there’s work to be done, so we have already reviewed this and have just finalised the adaptation of a new manual on sexual and gender-based violence with thanks to the UNDP (United Nations Development Program) and Restless Development which will become part of the training.
Social and cultural norms are complex and can rear their often-damaging heads even amongst those who are working hard to fight against them. An example of this related to dress codes for Girls’ Club members. Although not part of the official program curriculum, dress codes were often encouraged as facilitators were trying to establish a sense of self-confidence within members, and being well-dressed and groomed is part of a socio-cultural norm for many Sierra Leonean communities.
However, the message being unintentionally taught was that unless a girl follows the dress code, she won’t have the respect of her community and will attract unwanted attention from men.
In other words, wearing “inappropriate clothes” meant the girl — and not the man — was to blame for her lack of safety. This completely goes against everything we stand for and we will be looking for ways around this issue by further exploring cross-cultural intersections relating to sexual violence against women to help address such complex ingrained cultural beliefs.
Although Business Brains engages with boys through the in-school class curriculum and with men in the wider community, our program doesn’t have specific male-focused clubs and groups, like it does with girls. This can lead to some frustration from men and boys within communities, who believe they should be more involved to maintain a “gender balance”. However, when asked how their involvement would achieve equal gender balance, many responses reverted back to the ingrained stereotype that women are less intelligent than men.
For example, one boy commented that “boys are stronger and smarter than [girls] and we should be in the club too to make the club stronger”. These comments highlight that although there is some basic knowledge of the term “gender equality”, there is a lack of true understanding of what it means in practice. It emphasised that to create a platform for girls’ leadership and voice, we must increase our engagement with men and boys with care, to make sure there’s support for the program, to avoid backlash, and challenge these notions.
We’re going to take everything that we learnt from this recent evaluation to shape how our Business Brains program will run moving forward! And these are just some of the ways that we’re going to do that.
We’re rolling out Business Brains to 25 new schools in addition to our existing 20 schools to offer the program to not just One Girl Scholars, but to their entire year levels too, which will allow us to reach so many more students.
The primary goal of the new phase of the program is for young women to have a voice to make decisions about their own lives in an environment where they can access necessary opportunities and information. There will be a specific focus on leadership and confidence-building with opportunities to do public speaking, lead the clubs and participate in radio discussions on issues important to young women and girls.
We are going to expand the number of female teachers, volunteers and guardians involved in the program, so the girls can see firsthand what a strong female leader looks like. By recruiting mothers of students and other women for these roles, they will not only benefit from trainings and loan schemes themselves but also help them to support the younger generation of girls in school, advocating for them to the wider community.
And there’s plenty more where that came from. We can’t wait to share the full report with you on August 12th!
*These figures are for the entire school year beginning September 2017 and the school year beginning September 2018 (not just in Q3 and Q4) due to a difference in reporting periods. A school year in Sierra Leone is from September-July.
** These results are from the endline evaluation, and the 2019 Business Brains impact evaluation, which looked at the entire program from Dec 2016-Dec 2018.
All photos: Olivia Acland/One Girl.
We can’t thank the Morris Family Foundation enough for your ongoing support of our Business Brains program! And we hope you’re just as proud as we are of the impact it’s having for girls and their communities.
If you have any questions about this report, or our programs in general, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
