New consortium to “Amplify” the voices of adolescent girls in Africa
By Elly Sarakikya, SEGA’s Head of School
SEGA’s Head of School, Elly, meeting with Amplify partners in Rwanda in February.
Today is International Women’s Day! Held annually on March 8th, International Women’s Day celebrates the social, economic, cultural and political achievement of women across the world.
In honor of International Women’s Day, Nurturing Minds and SEGA are celebrating along with other founding members the announcement of a new consortium called Amplify.
In February SEGA participated in the consortium’s inaugural meeting in Kigali, Rwanda bringing together community based organizations (CBOs) that work with adolescent girls to explore how to collaborate and share best practices to better create social change. Small CBOs and schools like the SEGA Girls School often operate in a silo with limited resources to collaborate, network and share information. Amplify’s goal is to provide this important platform to help facilitate comprehensive discourse with multiple stake holders to coordinate a systematic approach which will create a large scale social impact for young women on the continent.
Amplify partners in Rwanda.
The expectation is that Amplify acts as an elevator of sorts as it does not intend to change what organizations do but will instead build capacity to advance a collective mission. If organizations and stake holders work together to address complex social issues such as poverty alleviation, gender inequality, education reform and health care together they can amplify their voices and be heard better than one organization working alone.
Amplify is rooted in the belief that community approaches, which value depth and collaboration will establish long term sustainable change. The objective is to scale ideas, programs and best practices across communities and countries. Through this collaboration the profile of CBOs in the development arena will be raised and will also help to advance the benefits of holistic approaches to working with adolescents.
Finally, Amplify will next create an on-line platform to share best practices, capture data and continuously learn from consortium members. The expected end result is that the collaboration will create a greater impact for a common goal and will ultimately improve the lives of African girls.
For more information on Amplify, visit their website: https://www.amplifygirls.org/