Hero Girls
The Hero Girls training course seeks to build confidence and a positive, proactive mindset through teaching the girls to draw on their innate skills and abilities to be change-makers in their own lives, homes, and community. In a world that often teaches girls to be subservient and compliant, this course will teach girls to ask questions, push boundaries, and innovate. This is achieved through focusing on three aspects; Self-Development, Entrepreneurship, and Leadership.
SELF-DEVELOPMENT
These sessions build foundational skills in communication, confidence, and connection with oneself and the world. Topics are chosen by the local facilitators and participants themselves and can range from goal setting, team work, communication techniques, personal safety, rights, etc. Sessions are conducted in small groups using discussion and participatory activities to learning that relevant and builds networks of support and trust.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
The Hero Girls course will teach basic entrepreneurship skills and then the students will get a chance to practice what hey have learned through creating an “Innovation Project”. Participants connect with local business, government, or civil society leadership to develop an entrepreneurship or social change project in their community.
LEADERSHIP
After the students complete their own instruction, they come back as “peer mentors” to coach and teach the next round of Hero Girl participants. Teaching a topic helps one learn and remember a subject more fully and teaching provides useful leadership skills. The next round of participants also benefit from learning from both adult facilitators and peer mentors, thus giving them varied perspectives and approaches to a given subject.
The program launched in Nepal in October of 2018. Within the first year of the program, we assisted over 500 girls by providing scholarships, family funding, educational resources, and materials they needed. We also were able to put 275 girls through the Hero Girls Empowerment program and provided 30 micro-loan packages to the mother's group to help get their business started!
As we continue to make a huge impact with the program, this year, we provided 100 bicycles for safe transportation to and from school along with supporting another class completing the empowerment program. In addition to the current support in Nepal, the Hero Girls program is going to be expanding the program to Sri Lanka in the next few years to tackle human trafficking.