The AGILE-Center is an afterschool capacity building space that intends to create access to quality education for adolescent girls from disadvantaged families, increase their academic performance and create opportunities for them to thrive in their lives. The AGILE-Center supports the fifth principle of the sustainable development goal.
We live in a community where not all girls have the chance to go to school. Girls often start school well but quickly abandon classes mainly just after their primary or middle school due to the following challenges: early marriage, teenage pregnancies, poverty, and lack of funds to pay their school fees and/or their school supplies. Furthermore, assumptions/bias that people have on girls and assumptions that girls have on themselves hinder their education. This study center serves as a place for girls’ empowerment, a place where girls come to get trained, learn, discover, build their potential. Lots of adolescent girls in our community get pregnant because they lack the information needed to make good decisions about their sexuality. Targeted adolescent girls come to access free resources and bring change to our communities. The center is an opportunity to boost girls’ motivation to stay at school, improve their academic performance and help them become independent adults and life-changers.
Target girls : Low-income school girls, orphan girls, girls with a disability
Age group : Middle high school girls aged 11-18 years
“The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.”— Mary McLeod Bethune
We believe reading opens minds and enables creativity. Literacy is a key element for girls’ empowerment. As they read, they develop critical thinking skills, improve their speaking skills, enrich their vocabulary and can defend their rights. Our library intends to enable our girls to access reading resources and get a transformative experience to unlock opportunities.
Our AGILE-Center offers a year-long series of training to empower girls. Girls come every weekend to attend workshops, training sessions on the following topics:
In addition to this, we invite some role model women to share their experience with these young girls and offer them the opportunity to ask questions.
Our Girls STEM Program aims at empowering girls in the STEM fields to prepare them for future jobs and enable them to become future problems solvers and leaders. Empowering and advancing girls in STEM will reduce gender barriers and create girls’ autonomy and independence. Out of 100 girls recruited only five can use a laptop. Fifty girls out of hundred have never seen a laptop. The need to train girls in how to use a laptop is high because the world today is digital.
The English language today plays a great role in learners’ life as it helps them to connect to the world and to access lots of opportunities globally. Today, from our experience, most of the opportunities are accessible in the English language. Furthermore, our country Togo recently joined the Common Wealth and there is a crucial need to teach and learn the English language.
We want to keep offering more opportunities to our girls by teaching them the English language.
Not all the students work at the same speed. As they do not all learn at the same pace, some need more extra sessions. The girls we are working with can’t afford an after-class teacher to support them. Thus, we offer remedial classes to these girls for free at the center. Most of our remedial classes are on science (Math and Physics)
We believe that if girls are financially autonomous, they will be able to take care of themselves and avoid depending on others basically on boys who often impregnate them on exchange of some little money. Empowering girls through entrepreneurial training will enable them to trust themselves, handle a lucrative activity to stand strongly in the society and be respected. Through this program, we want to address the problem of poverty and girls’ financial dependence which hinder their education and prevent them from asserting themselves in the society. One of the biggest causes of early pregnancies or girls’ prostitution is the lack of the financial means.
Our end goal is to get girls have an activity they can do to earn money to take care of themselves and as a result become financially independent. The sustainability of this program lays in the fact that following these series of training, the girls will open a small shop at the center where they could sell their products. This will help them to meet their hottest needs which are school fees, photocopies, school supplies and also their breakfast at school. One of the best things about this project is that these girls who will follow the training will become trainers for the upcoming cohorts and there won’t be any need spending money to pay trainers to come again.
Empowering girls in our communities is also allowing them to access some of the activities longtime considered to be male’s activities. This is the case of playing drums. Even though we have some women trying to insert themselves in developing these skills in drums playing, the activity is still considered to be men’s causing problems during many events in our communities. When men are absent, this means that women can’t enjoy the music or otherwise, they have to beg or hire some men to come and play. This is also the case in schools where boys expect girls to beg them before they play any musical instrument for them during the cultural events often organized in schools for students to show their extra academic skills and to share their culture with one another.
Allowing the AGILE-Center girls to acquire drums and learn how to play them is to break this barrier or bias and give them the opportunity to be autonomous.
Games are a way of developing great skills in the young people and a way of cultivating teamwork, friendship and developing minds. Following the projection of an African movie called the Queen of Katwe which is a real-life story, where Fiona, a girl coming from a disadvantaged area and family has been able to defeat many candidates to become the champion in chess competition and also earned money to help her family, our girls fell interested in chess and other games like domino and scrabble.
