Girl-led activism; Effective and Promising Strategies and Approaches to Advancing Adolescent Girls

"Msichana" is a Swahili term for a girl who, depending on her place of birth, often faces the harsh reality of having her education, health, and bodily autonomy choices restricted. At the heart of Msichana Empowerment Kuria’s mission lies the belief that girls born today deserve the care, support, and resources necessary to thrive and reach their full potential. For 13 years, we have collaborated with girls and their communities to drive systemic change, empowering girls to lead and ensuring that social change prioritizes their well-being and capabilities.

Girls during, Msichana's village safe spaces convening

In this blog, we will highlight four key elements we have identified as essential for programming girl-led and centred programs while working with the most marginalized girls in our communities as key partners. These contribute to effective and promising strategies to enable adolescent girls and young women's leadership in tackling urgent social justice, and political, socio-economic issues facing girls, women and other marginalized groups.

First is Girl Protection and Safeguarding; As an organisation working with girls, we have a responsibility to support the protection of girls, and a duty of care to the girls with whom we work. In practice, this means putting in place the right policies and procedures to ensure that programmes, operations, staff, and partners do no harm.

Second is Finding Her; which looks at the various aspects of ensuring our projects are intentional about targeting the right kind of girls for girl-centred programs; utilising tools like Adolescent Girls Mapping for profiling and segmentation and doing resource can. We created a spin-off of The Population Council’s Girl Roster to find the most left-behind girls and to make invisible girls visible.

Third is Listening to Her: During this time, we hold meaningful consultations with girls and build her assets.  Our favourite mantra has been “It is not enough to invite girls to the table. The table must be made so that the girls are even interested in sitting there". These girl consultations are a crucial aspect of the listening to her process that helps us understand how to bring girls’ voices and experiences into program design by doing listening activities that are fun and interesting. In practice, these listening sessions should be tailored to girls by age and cognitive ability.

One of the lessons we are currently learning is about building girls' assets, a process where we understand what assets girls need and at what stage to reduce risk and increase opportunity, articulate why each particular asset is important for girls to have, and when it’s important to deliver these assets according to their perspective.

The final element is Designing with Her: This element complements the rest of the elements and allows the program team and girls to be physically involved in the programming, particularly in areas related to social justice and political and socio-economic activities. In practice, it includes a process of Opportunity Synthesis, Brainstorming the Solution and Prototyping.

In conclusion, by prioritizing girl-led and girl-centered approaches, including protection and safeguarding, intentional outreach, meaningful engagement, and collaborative design, we can unlock the transformative potential of every girl and effectively advance adolescent girls' leadership in some of the most urgent issues, like tackling violence against girls and women, child marriage, limited access to girls education, and female genital mutilation.

This blog has been authored by our founder, Natalie Robi Tingo