Girls' Leadership and Mentoring is one of five thematic reviews published by
the Population Council that address the five strategic priorities defined in
the United Nations Joint Statement "Accelerating Efforts to Advance the
Rights of Adolescent Girls" whose purpose is to advance key policies and
programmes for the hardest-to-reach adolescent girls. Each perspective seeks to
focus on broad social and economic issues that underpin the human rights of
adolescent girls - overall development, health, and well-being, and redirect
efforts for girls from those who control or influence their lives (parents,
in-laws, boys, men, perpetrators) directly to the girls themselves.
In Girls' Leadership and Mentoring, the author lays out basic knowledge and
premises followed by promoted policies and practices.
Knowledge and Premises:
- Girls have fewer opportunities, compared with boys, to
meet same-sex friends, make new friends, and interact with mentors.
Organising high-quality programmes and strengthening social assets
(friends, mentors) for vulnerable girls and young women builds leadership
skills, provides opportunities, and lessens their health and economic
risks.
- There are girls with leadership potential in every
community in the world. Building girls´ leadership abilities provides
heroes and role models for young girls, empowers and strengthens older
girls, and challenges outmoded community norms.
- Young girls need local leaders to look up to and
emulate. This can be achieved by investing in opportunities (organising)
to strengthen local, indigenous girls' leadership to ensure that there is
a cadre of young female leaders within the community.
- The opportunity to be seen as a leader and mentor in a
community changes a girl’s view of herself.
- The presence of a network of young female leaders (and
a safe space that they regularly occupy) implicitly and explicitly
challenges the power structure within a community and lends a strong
female voice to decision-making structures in the community. Leadership opportunities
and social spaces for girls and young women to meet must be created. For
example, a law was adopted in Guatemala in 1996 stating that all
communities would have places where females can meet. When a cadre of
female leaders is developed, they can begin to claim these spaces.
Policies and Practices:
Cascading Leadership: Begin with the girls' leadership that exists where you
are; build programme models from there. Training is essential for a cascading
leadership model. Older adolescent girls and young women from 18-30 are trained
to mentor younger girls in their communities including running groups for new
girls.The critical elements of a cascading leadership model are as follows:
- Train older adolescent girls or young women to be
leaders within their own communities and run programmes for younger
adolescent girls.
- Support mentors with appropriate compensation.
- Provide mentors with ongoing supervision and support.
- Involve girls in identifying the most appropriate
content and delivery methods for their programme.
- Employ leaders and mentors who are themselves girls;
they are often the most effective and sustainable in the long term in
delivering content to other girls in their community.
- Recognise that mentors and peer educators are two
different models that serve different purposes.
- Mentorship implies older girls/women in leadership
roles and with responsibilities working with younger girls who can see an
example of what they can be in the future. Mentoring can build a lasting
structure of leadership and programme- delivery.
- Peer education implies the transfer of information from
young people to their age mates and often elevates already outstanding
youth to a peer position, but does less to build new leaders or a lasting
programme delivery and leadership infrastructure.
- Experiment with content once a structure is in place.
The author advocates exploring a vast arena of possible content that
organised girls themselves can begin to develop such as health information
(girls trained to provide the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine to
adolescent girls in their community); civic leadership in which girls mobilise
to ensure that all girls have necessary identification to vote and otherwise
participate in public life; and financial education in which trained girls
provide financial education and services.
Girls' Leadership and Mentoring provides links to and descriptions of
several resources that may be helpful in developing these models. The resources
come from diverse places such as Kenya, Uganda, Guatemala, and Ethiopia. There
are also links to two toolkits: Girl-Centred Programme Design: A Toolkit to
Develop, Strengthen & Expand Programmes for Adolescent Girls, and Promoting
Healthy, Safe, and Productive Transitions to Adulthood.
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http://www.worldywca.org/YWCA-News/World-YWCA-and-Member-Associations-News/Mobilising-young-women-s-leadership-The-World-YWCA-Mentoring-Programme
Mobilising
Young Women’s Leadership – The World YWCA Mentoring Programme
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