Economic Empowerment

KadAfrica is an innovative agribusiness that uses passion fruit farming to empower out of school girls in Western Uganda. Our innovation “The KadAfrica Experience" provides an end-to-end business solution for girls to become less vulnerable and participate in their local economies. The innovation equips girls with knowledge, skills, and assets to begin their own farms, and they become entrepreneurial leaders generating income through agribusiness.

Priya Nanda of the International Center for Research on Women in the U.S. will help young women in India secure decent employment and raise healthy families by giving adolescent girls access to relevant skills, resources, and connections, and engaging schoolboys and male community members to promote gender equality. They will recruit teachers to implement a specialized curriculum in schools, and connect with local businesses to create pathways to employment. Providing women with access to work should improve family health and income as well as promote economic growth and development.

Randeep Kaur from Room to Read in India will evaluate a program that teaches life skills, provides mentoring, and establishes community support to ensure girls complete secondary school education and can build healthier lives for themselves and their families. Life skills such as self-confidence and relationship building have recently been shown to boost adult economic outcome. Their Girls' Education Program will be tested in a randomized control trial with over 100 schools in Rajasthan, India, where there is a high incidence of child labor and relatively few girls enroll in school.

Fatima Adamu from the Federal University Birnin Kebbi in Nigeria will support the transition of adolescent girls from secondary school into heath-related careers such as medicine, midwifery, and nursing to address the shortage of female health workers specifically in rural northern Nigeria. Social norms dictate that women only receive reproductive care from females, so a shortage means that many, particularly in the North, do not receive any health care during pregnancy.