Among our most enduring and successful projects, programming related to Girls’ Empowerment—beginning with our Girls’ Empowerment Clubs (GEC) in Eswatini, gives us great pride. This year, this flagship program experienced significant growth.

“We welcomed international volunteers from Crossroads International as part of our multifaceted partnership,” explains Leocadie Gbenahin, Legal and Youth Program Officer for GF2D (Groupe de réflexion et d'action de Femme, Démocratie et Développement) Togo.

In Ghana, we have worked for many years supporting a range of projects with the access-to-justice organization WILDAF-Ghana (we first began our partnership with WILDAF with their founding organization in Zimbabwe and have been working on girls’ empowerment programming with WiLDAF-Ghana since 2013). In Togo, we work with GF2D Togo, with whom we have engaged in a range of projects and who have hosted North-South volunteers from Canada in various roles, including an advisor on reproductive health who created training materials for the dozens of Girls’ Empowerment Clubs we support in the country. This year, our programming with both organizations has responded to an urgent need to prevent violence against women and girls that surged during the disruption, economic insecurity and stay-at-home orders associated with COVID-19.

“Before I joined the Girls Empowerment club,” says Celestine Adzimah, a participant in a Girls’ Empowerment Club in Ghana who joined in 2015, “I didn’t have the knowledge and confidence to engage other girls. But since I became a member I have been able to enlighten other girls about their sexual and reproductive health rights. I no longer shy away from such topics, I speak to them in comfort.”

Gaining confidence as she gained knowledge, Adzimah eventually became president of her local GEC. She learned about laws relating to gender-based violence such as Ghana’s Domestic Violence Act, the Children’s Act, and the human rights provisions of the country’s constitution, as well as where to report abuse of any kind. As a member of the GEC alumni, she remains connected with the GECs even as she moves on to study public relations in university. Adzimah has also built on what she learned to respond to the current crisis as a member of our partner WiLDAF Ghana’s COVID-19 Alliance Committee.

Alice Bisiba Najombe is a former Girls’ Empowerment Club member, now living out the hope and confidence she acquired as a member of the GEC: “One important thing I learnt from the Girls’ Empowerment Club is that beyond the sky is my limit,” she says. Najombe, currently an intern with WILDAF-Ghana and a business student at the University of Ghana, notes that child and forced marriage are common in her home region of Nkwanta North district. With both confidence and knowledge gained in the GEC, she now fields questions about child marriage from her hometown and refers cases to WILDAF-Ghana. As for Adzimah, self-empowerment has led Najombe to become a force for her community.

“I must not give room to anything that will stop me from achieving great things and being the leader, I am to be in my life, community, country and the world as whole” says Essi Massan Epiphanie Abgadja.

TGNP works against all forms of discrimination against women and other marginalized groups. With one in every five women in Tanzania over the age of fifteen experiencing sexual violence and one in ten having been through female genital mutilation (FGM)—35 per cent of them before the age of one—there is tremendous work to be done. We are proud to work with TGNP to take on this challenge, providing workshops that raise awareness and building the leadership skills of a generation of women and girls changing the status quo. Through the Karen Takacs Women’s Leadership Fund, we’ve been able to support some particularly responsive work with impressive reach despite the increasing pressure resulting from the pandemic.

This year, Crossroads supported TGNP in carrying out workshops on gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) and leadership trainings, reaching sixty community leaders across three different districts. GRB is a deeply practical technique that allows participants to really see the impact of unequal economic relations and to integrate economic justice from the very beginning of any project.

Mary Isaac Jonah is a security officer at Yutko Tea Factory and a member of the village security committee who was able to access both leadership and GRB trainings. The trainings, she says, “have completely transformed my perspective on my position and potential as a woman for the welfare of my family and community, as well as my rights and responsibilities in the society.” Indeed, learning about the different forms of gender-based violence led her to think back to her divorce, years before.

“[I] discovered I was physically, financially and psychologically or emotionally abused, and that there are laws, government institutions and organizations with resources to deal with such issues. Had I learned this sooner and reported [my ex-husband], perhaps I could have protected me and my children from the suffering and loss of everything after the divorce”. It’s never too late to share knowledge, though. As a member of her local ward knowledge centre, Jonah will now share what she has learned to empower the next generation.

Although women make up most of the participants in these trainings, men may also take a stand for gender justice—and they are vital allies in a context where patriarchal relations are based on deeply held ideologies and must be challenged again and again to make change. “The Gender Responsive Budgeting training was very helpful and the most interesting aspect to me,” says one such participant, Gervas Msaba, Chairman of Mwanazi village in Kibuko ward. “It gave me new knowledge that I did not have and also showed clearly how it can be practiced at all levels from as low as the village level and that has helped us as leaders to understand better the advocacy works done by our community members and support it.”

The impact, explains a participant from the Zirai Knowledge Centre, has been profound. For example, a GBR analysis of the local schools’ budget allocations has resulted in reduction of stigma surrounding menstrual hygiene for girls as the budget includes provision of free sanitary pads with funding from government and volunteers. The result? A reduction in school dropouts among girls.

The project is a collaboration between Crossroads International, ActionAid International Senegal, and the experienced local organizations APROFES (l’Association pour la promotion de la femme sénégalaise) and CONAFE Sénégal (la Coalition Nationale des Associations et ONG en faveur de l'Enfant). The success of this project would not have been possible without the funding from Global Affairs Canada and the generous support of individual supporters and institutional funders.

Peer-to-peer education is a powerful way to empower young people, who are most receptive to other teenagers. DAMCAM stands for “Daande am –cellal am”, which in the local language, Fulani, means “My voice, my health.”

Aissatou Sow, who lives in Fongolimbi, a region of isolated villages far from health facilities, explains that having learned about sexual and reproductive health through DAMCAM, she now relays what she has learned to the community. “My role is to go to the local level to share with my friends, my parents to raise their awareness.”

Reaching out to all stakeholders in this way—raising awareness of reproductive health issues among parents, traditional and religious leaders, local officials and of course the teens themselves— DAMCAM directly targets an amazing 30,000 teenage girls. It will ultimately reach 75,000 indirect beneficiaries with awareness-raising measures against forced and early marriages, sexual abuse and Sexually Transmitted Infections, and early pregnancies, and they will benefit from improved access to health services.

“What we have learned will let us continue the struggle by raising awareness about adolescent sexual health and reproductive health,” says participant Moussa Makhan Danfakha, who is part of a theatre group that brings a light, popular touch to these weighty themes, engaging her fellow teens. “We have taken ownership of this program.”

When false rumours spread that the second-hand European clothing and goods he sold, in a local market in Burkina Faso, were taken from the corpses of COVID-19 victims, 52-year-old Margueritte Campaore’s husband was quickly put out of work. This put the couple among the 90 per cent of members of the Collectif des Associations de Restauratrices et Transformatrices des Produits Locaux, a collective of local businesses, deeply affected by the pandemic. Crossroads’ partner, ASMADE (Association Songui Manegré/Aide au Développement Endogène, a Crossroads partner since 2020), which launched the collective nearly twenty years ago, conducted the 2020 study that revealed these distressing numbers attesting to the deep and varied economic impact the pandemic has had on these small-scale vendors and entrepreneurs. This year, we supported ASMADE’s pandemic response project, which helped Margueritte Campaore get back on her feet.

“The project has given us hope”, she says. “First of all, it allowed us to consolidate the bonds of solidarity between us. The activities we relaunched provide us with substantial revenues today. With these gains, we are able to participate in commercial markets.”

Another beneficiary of this important project helping small business owners weather the effects of the pandemic is 55-year-old Elizabeth Ouedraogo. Her previous business shut down as a result of the pandemic, and she decided to retrain in sustainable agriculture, using her existing garden.

Through ASMADE and another partner, INERA (Institut de l’Environnement et de Recherches Agricoles, Burkina Faso’s major agricultural and environmental research organization), Ouedraogo took part in a pandemic response project involving development of supply chains for production and sale of kénaf leaves (a plant that yields a fiber similar to jute) for the production of babenda and kanzaga—two popular dishes made with kenaf—in high demand regions of the country. Necessary equipment like sprinklers and trellises allowed Ms. Ouedraogo to nourish and protect her garden, and she was provided with quality, organic seeds to sow, allowing her to quickly achieve a significant yield. Thus, she was able to restore and improve her working conditions and economic situation, work closer to home, feed her family with the same nutritious plant she sells, and profit from and contribute to new supply chains and sustainable agriculture within the community. For her, says Ouedraogo, this Crossroads partnership represents a fresh start.

“I began educating everyone on gender-based violence and offering family planning services thanks to the training I received. People place a greater importance on my role in the community, every time we need to give an opinion on a subject of community interest, many people give a lot of weight to my proposals and to my person.” - Abédou Wessike, a 55-year-old community health worker in Haho District, Togo who received training through our partner ATBEF (Association Togolaise pour le Bien-Etre Familial) as part of a project to strengthen services relating to women’s health and to reduce gender-based violence.

As it’s been said, the past isn’t dead: it isn’t even past. We will live, for example, with the impact of climate change for the rest of our lives. Adaptation is vital to ensure that women can have livelihoods that let them live with dignity and support their families. Sustainable farming, using innovative techniques, is empowering women economically while contributing to greater food security across their communities. This is doubly important, because to the impact of environmental change upon access to food, we must add growing poverty, which likewise reduces food security. Other trends relating to growing poverty in the regions in which we work include, unfortunately, increased rates of gender-based violence.

“Now through the program, I’ve increased my knowledge on biological and ecological agriculture, especially diseases, insects, bio-pesticide treatments and organic modifications […] my revenues have increased.”
— Khady Drame, participant in a sustainable agriculture project in Senegal

By targeting youth with many of our projects, we aim to ensure the past shapes the future in more positive ways. Take for example young women who have been through the Girls’ Empowerment Clubs that now exist in a number of countries: they come to adulthood with an understanding of their legal and human rights and experience collective empowerment. Or consider a COVID-19 response project in Ivory Coast, in which Crossroads and our partner CEFCI (Le Centre Féminin pour la démocratie et les droits humains en Côte d’Ivoire) developed innovative and sustainable economic development activities to address this period of hardship in a holistic way. By learning to create reusable, washable menstrual hygiene products, the young women participants gain practical skill as artisans, while also reducing expenditures and days of school lost due to not being able to afford single-use menstrual pads—and they reduce the stigma of menstruation among their peers. Tackling gender inequality and poverty has a ripple effect that is felt across communities, and across time. Together, and despite the challenges, we face the future with resilience, with innovation, and with hope.

Previously, “I sometimes had to miss classes during my period,” says Ouattara Mariame, a participant in the menstrual pad production and distribution project. And: “I appreciate that it’s clean and economical. I know adolescents at Bouaké who need them,” says participant Sako Salimata, 19.