Global Initiative for the Education and Literacy of African Girls

#ProjectFUNDS | #ProjectHOPE | #ProjectBUILD | #ProjectRECRUIT

Each project aims to provide FREE EDUCATION for African Girls who have passion for education, but are scared of being kidnapped, sold, humiliated, maimed, or at risk to lose their lives for choosing to go to school.

Why Girls

According to UNESCO estimates, 130 million girls between the age of 6 and 17 are out of school and 15 million girls of primary-school age—half of them in sub-Saharan Africa— will never enter a classroom.
Poverty remains the most important factor for determining whether a girl can access an education.

Seven main benefits of girls’ education to society:

1. More educated girls and women aspire to become leaders and thus expand a country’s leadership and entrepreneurial talent.
2. It is the quality of schooling that really counts; economic growth is faster when girls (and boys) learn.
3. More equal education means greater economic empowerment for women through more equal work opportunities for women and men
4. More educated girls and young women are healthier—and as adults they have healthier children.
5. More educated mothers have more educated children, especially daughters.
6. More educated women are better able to protect themselves and their families from the effects of economic and environmental shocks.
7. Education is valuable for girls in and of itself. Finally, in the words of Urvashi Sahni, an Indian girls’ education activist, “even without all of the ‘developmental and economic goodies’ that come
from girls’ education, we should care about educating girls because it is inherently valuable to them and is their right”

Why African Girls

Some of the world’s most disadvantaged children with regards to access to quality education is in the continent of Africa; with girls suffering the hardest blow due to cultural gender discrimination and other factors. The female gender is seen across cultures in Africa as merely people who are meant to belong to the kitchen and to the “other room”. In west Africa, most girls are trained by their mothers from an early age, about the importance of being a supportive wife to her husband, girls are sent out in their early lives to hawk and sell things on the street (child labor) including selling their bodies (sexual slaves) to help her parents provide for her siblings. Other cultures betroth their very young females as early as 2 years of age to a certain well know man in the community, who has achieved some fame or affluence in the community through activities like hunting, wrestling etc., to eventually become her husband as soon as they reach a certain age.

These cultural practices that has gone on for so many centuries are in every way a disservice to girl education in Africa. And to make matters worse, terrorist organizations like “Boko Haram” have used young girls in the past as su***de bombers, as well as 2nd or subsequent wives for traditional rulers. Other young girls were never sent to school as this was viewed as a waste of money, instead their male counterparts were encouraged to go to school and become responsible people in the community.

If there’s a time that African girls need the world, that time is now! It is because of all these challenges that face the African girl child that GIFTED was founded to summon the global community to come to the rescue of girl child education in Africa, before it is too late. Africa’s girls are disappearing from schools and are being forced to marry into homes as 2nd, third, fourth or subsequent wives. Others end up in prostitution due to lack of resources to send them to school, or as a result of the pressure of poverty. Its time for the global community to come to the rescue of these girls and encourage girl child education in Africa.

At GIFTED, we believe that quality education is a God-given human right, and its our Passion.

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GIFTED is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, exempt from federal income tax under Internal Revenue code (IRC) Section 501(c)(3) registered in New York City. Donors can deduct/write-off contributions they make to GIFTED under IRC section 170.