Help Girls to Fight Child Marriage in Zimbabwe

This report is being sent to sixty friends who have donated $6,512 to our GlobalGiving appeals on behalf of the Women Advocacy Project (WAP) in Zimbabwe.

This is report #22, so you should be familiar with WAP’s program to help girls make soap by now! But there is always something new to report, and this time it is special. Over the past year, two groups of high school students in the US have raised money for the program in Zimbabwe by making and selling their own soap. This has enabled thirty-one members of the soap-making team in Zimbabwe to re-enter school. They enrolled this past week.

It’s a spectacular way to start the new year and say goodbye to a pandemic that has devastated education in Africa. The US soap sales have also raised the morale of the young soap-makers in Zimbabwe, who sold over 18,000 bottles of soap last year and are aiming for 32,000 bottles in 2023.

How has it happened? We’ll explain in this report.

*

First, a short recap.

WAP was founded in 2012 by Constance to curb child marriage, which affects about a third of all girls in Zimbabwe under the age of 18. She turned to soap in 2019 after it became clear that the main pressure on girls to marry young comes from poverty. We asked McLane, a graduate student from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, to spend the summer in Zimbabwe as a Peace Fellow and help.

Constance then followed the same time-honored path taken by so many successful entrepreneurs. First she checked out the competition and realized there was a market for all-purpose soap in the underserved neighborhoods of Harare. Helped by your donations, she then organized soap training for girls which – after some trial and error - produced a nice, thick, gooey, green substance. The girls came up with a catchy brand name, Clean Girl, and began to visit local stores, known as tuck shops.

Sales were picking up when the pandemic struck in early 2020 and temporarily halted production, but the girls didn’t miss a beat and distributed the unsold soap to needy families in their neighborhoods. WAP resumed production on a limited scale but cut back the number of soap-makers to four. Whatever soap was made was shared out among the rest of the girls to be sold locally. The girls kept half of the proceeds and gave the rest back to WAP, to be reinvested.

*

Meanwhile, soap-making was also getting under way in the US at two high schools in 2021. As in Zimbabwe, both teams went through the same process of trial and error.

The first group was from the Girl Up club at the Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. They would meet over weekends and work outside on balconies and by the summer of 2022 they had made several batches of exotic-looking, aromatic-smelling soap with the same brand name (Clean Girl) that the girls use in Zimbabwe. In June 2022 they took their soap out on the streets of Arlington and raised a cool $682 for the Zimbabwe project.

Over the same period a second group of American high school students was also making soap in Atlanta, Georgia, under the direction of Nina, our youngest-ever Peace Fellow. Nina had signed up in 2021 to provide remote support to the Zimbabwe project, and she persuaded a group of friends at the South Forsyth High School to join her in making their own Clean Girl soap. The brand was catching on!

We visited Nina recently and found her team mixing and cooking in Nina’s basement. It was a cheerful occasion, even after the mixer broke and they had to resort to stirring with spoons. Within thirty minutes they had produced a creamy lavender-colored mixture which was poured into cardboard boxes and left to set. Once hardened it would be carved up into blocks and sold outside local grocery stores.

Like the Arlington team, Nina’s group has made $600 from selling their soap and enjoyed every minute of it. As Nina told us: “We’ve had fun and learned a lot.”

*

While these heroics were underway in the US, the business in Zimbabwe has been thriving. No fewer than 220 girls have earned money from soap since 2019 and many lessons have been learned.

One lesson is that you do not need a degree from Business School to launch a business. In WAP's case, it started with a visionary leader (Constance) and investors like yourselves who funded the start-up in 2019. Other donors came on board in 2021 when it became clear that the business model was sound.

It continued with trial and error, with each stage producing improvements. As in Nina's basement, the soap was initially stirred by hand but in 2022 WAP purchased mechanical mixers and productivity soared.

Donors got into the spirit. One far-sighted donor – Rockflower – invested in a new factory which allowed WAP to produce and store thousands of bottles. Another donor, Action for World Solidarity in Berlin, paid for solar panels. The project also received good advice from Together Women Rise, another major investor. Could Clean Girl reduce plastic by recycling? The bottles themselves are too fragile to be used twice, but the caps are more sturdy and WAP now gives the girls a dollar for every 20 bottle caps they can recycle. So far the program has recycled 2,000 caps.

Dawa, our 2022 Peace Fellow from Texas A and M University, secured a vehicle through the Swiss embassy in Zimbabwe that has also increased productivity.

This has been North-South partnership at its best and most imaginative.

With the end of the pandemic, Constance has reorganized the workforce. She has hired the four girls who took on production during the pandemic and increased the incentives for the rest of the girls who do the selling. The bottles sell for $1.50. Each girl is given a batch of 11 cases comprising 66 bottles and keeps 100% of what she sells.

WAP, meanwhile, puts aside a third of the bottles that are produced and sells them in bulk outside Harare. This has put more than $10,000 in the bank and should allow WAP to contribute 15% of the program costs in 2023 – an important step on the road to sustainability.

Capping it off, the original dream remains intact. Of the 220 girls who have made and sold soap in Zimbabwe since 2019, only eight have married. All were 18 or older.

*

While the soap business in Zimbabwe is all about making money, it has also been reinforced by team-building and social cohesion.

The girls are organized into clubs which meet regularly under a girl “ambassador” (usually a soap-producer) to encourage new arrivals and report any threats from would-be marriage suitors. During the height of the pandemic, the girls also designed a quirky tee-shirt (“Be Brave – Get Vaccinated!) - and mobilized scores of friends and neighbors to get a COVID jab.

WAP has also made good use of AP's embroidery program. The girls have stitched embroidered stories about child marriage and the pandemic which have been made into advocacy quilts and exhibited. The girls are also producing embroidery for sale through our new online store.

In spite of their achievements, the girls stil face one major threat that was heightened by the pandemic. Over 50 girls have dropped out of school. As a result, we have joined with WAP to put 31 of the soap-makers back in school, at a cost of $3,600 this year. The first term has been paid for by the $1,282 raised by the two high school soap teams in Atlanta and Arlington.

*

As Nina reflected on all of this from the suburbs of Atlanta, in between juggling classes and college applications, she could only marvel at WAP’s achievements: “They’ve sold 16,000 bottles of soap in the face of so many struggles? That’s – wow! There is so much we can learn from each other.”

Partnering with the girls in Zimbabwe has given Nina a deeper appreciation for the value of education in countries where it cannot be taken for granted. One of her dreams is to visit the girls in Zimbabwe.

Meanwhile, her team hopes to Zoom with some of the girl ambassadors in Zimbabwe and strategize about WAP’s education fund. We’ll report back on progress in three months.

In gratitude

WAP in Zimbabwe and the AP team in Washington.

This report is being sent, with gratitude, to friends who have helped us to support girls in Zimbabwe through our partner in Harare, Women Advocacy Project (WAP).

You have donated to three appeals on GlobalGiving since 2018 which have raised a combined $6,231. This is of course fantastic. Even more fantastic is the fact that your donations have helped WAP to leverage well over $100,000 for the program and inspire innovation by girls in some of Africa’s toughest neighborhoods.

It started in 2018 when WAP took a stand against child marriage, which is widespread in Zimbabwe. We sent Alex, a student at Columbia University, to work with Constance, the founder of WAP. They came up with the idea of asking several girls to serve as “ambassadors” and organize clubs that would rally around girls at risk. We launched our first appeal on GlobalGiving to cover the cost of stipend and training.

The following year, Peace Fellow McLane from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, picked up where Alex left off and helped Constance to launch a pilot project to make and sell soap in the Epworth neighborhood. A second appeal from GlobalGiving raised $1,935 and paid for the materials. By the end of 2019, the girls had sold over 3,000 bottles of their Clean Girl soap. They had also described the threat from child marriage through a striking advocacy quilt which was displayed by Constance at the 2019 UN summit on women and girls in Nairobi.

The arrival of COVID-19 in March 2020 put soap-making on hold. Undeterred, the girls distributed emergency supplies to poor families. They also used their stitching skills to describe the savage impact of the pandemic on their lives.

As the pandemic began to recede, the girls returned to soap-making and sold around 6,000 bottles in 2020. Dickson from WAP profiled some of the WAP stars - Lisa, Trish, Tanatswa and Evelyn - for this sparkling video. Donors were impressed and WAP secured a 2-year commitment of $107,000 from four donors: Together Women Rise, Action for World Solidarity in Berlin, Rockflower and ourselves.

*

Finally freed from lockdowns and helped by Dawa, our wonderful 2022 Peace Fellow, the WAP soap stars have taken their thriving business to a next level.

They are still worried about child marriage but none of them has married since the program began five years ago and they now see a much larger threat from poverty to their families and community. This has been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine which has led to food shortages, and by inflation. Some families earn as little as $2 a day while prices are soaring.

Soap remains their best hope to supplementing the family income. Sixty-eight girls are now participating in the program and they are about to reach their 2022 target of 16,000 bottles with three months still to go.

This has been achieved by streamlining and by reducing costs. A grant from Rockflower paid for a new center/factory where production can be centralized. WAP has also turned to solar power to avoid the crippling power outages that affect Harare. (Four panels were paid for donors, and another two from WAP’s soap profits.) Peace Fellow Dawa helped to secure a new vehicle from the Swiss embassy. This leaves WIFI as the major infrastructural challenge. WAP has improved labelling and packaging, which also saves time and money.

Instead of being shared out between all of the girls, the production of soap has been assigned to four experts – Trish, Dorcas, Lyness and Rosemary. This system was forced on WAP by the lockdowns but has proved to be highly efficient and been retained.

At the same time, all 68 girls take part in selling the soap and share the financial rewards - which is the main goal of the program. Over the past three years the girls have built up a loyal customer base in homes, in all-purpose stores (known as “tuck-shops”) and at supermarkets. This has allowed WAP to raise the price of Clean Girl soap by 50%, boosting sales.

The soap-sellers are no longer working in teams and helping each other to haggle for the best price, as we showed in the video. That is no longer necessary now that customers know the product.

Instead, WAP now gives each girl 11 cases - 66 bottles of soap - to sell in her neighborhood. She keeps 70% of what she sells and the remainder goes back to WAP to be re-invested. This means that the girls will share well over $12,000 this year, while WAP expects to have over $10,000 in the bank account by December. This is serious money!

*

Their success with soap has given the WAP girls a taste for innovation, starting with the environment.

The program is heavily dependent on plastic but as is so often the case in Africa, alternatives are incredibly expensive. There is no support for recycling in Zimbabwe and the Clean Girl bottles are too fragile to be used a second time. Bottle caps, however, are sturdy and can be cleaned and re-used. What is more, the cap accounts for 40% of the cost of each bottle (20 cents). WAP has promised the girls an additional dollar for every 20 caps they retrieve from customers. This is already proving popular.

At a time when food is short, WAP may also ask mothers of the girls to explore composting food waste and growing vegetables as practiced by our inspiring partner Stella in Nairobi. This would address the twin threats of pollution and hunger.

Having endured two years of lock-down the girls understood the importance of vaccinations and drew on the successful campaign in the Nairobi settlement of Kangemi to make the case for vaccinations to their own relatives and friends. This has produced 76 jabs so far.

Education is also on the agenda. No fewer than 50 of the 68 girls have yet to complete secondary school and AP and WAP have decided to launch a fund to provide scholarships. Peace Fellow Dawa created a spreadsheet of beneficiaries and estimates the cost at around $24,500 over 3 years. AP will prime the pump with $2,000. Of this, $682 was raised by American High School students who made and sold their own Clean Girl soap in solidarity with the WAP girls - a wonderful example of how Africa can inspire innovation in the US. WAP will contribute $500 from its soap sales to the new fund.

The WAP girls have also drawn on their talent for stitching to produce 30 embroidered blocks that will be offered for sale through a new AP online store this Fall, opening up another source of income. Bobbi and Delaney from AP visited Zimbabwe in the summer to offer advanced training.

*

It is hard to remain immune to the charm of the young WAP soap artists. Bobbi and Delaney, our embroidery trainers, found their enthusiasm infectious and enjoyed their sense of humor (photo). Our Peace Fellow Dawa organized a party to celebrate the opening of the new factory that turned into one long succession of hugs and gifts. As Dawa wrote in a blog: “I know I will cherish these tokens of friendships for a lifetime.”

But at the same time this is a business and tough decisions lie ahead. Dickson, who manages the program, reckons that his four soap producers could make over 50,000 bottles next year and is keen to keep them busy. This could produce as much as $30,000 for WAP.

But would it be enough to cover the increased cost of material? This will be made harder by the fact that one of WAP’s main grants ends in December. Dickson is doing the math and producing a new 3-year plan. He knows that the program will be measured by how soon it can be self-sustaining and will set bench-marks for how to get there.

If this could be achieved by girls who have faced down the pandemic and (in many cases) dropped out of school, it would send a brilliant signal to other hard-pressed urban communities in Africa.

In gratitude

WAP in Harare and AP in Washington

Links:

• Video about the Zimbabwe soap project
• Our news bulletin on the selling of Clean Girl soap in the US
• Girls in Zimbabwe use embroidery to tell their story of COVID