Valuable Girl: Empower 100,000 Girls in Egypt

What happens when you awaken someone's understanding of their own rights and self-worth?

Valuable Girl Project coordinators know that awakening, because they've seen it on the faces — and heard it in the words — of young women in some of Egypt's poorest, most tradition-bound villages.

Lara, a Valuable Girl in Luxor, describes her own awakening this way: "I've learned that girls and boys are equals, and that there's no difference between us. I've also learned about my rights and duties."

Awakenings like Lara's come despite huge obstacles. As she says: "In my village, we have solid customs and traditions that girls shouldn’t finish their education, and we're not even allowed to go out of the house. Most of the girls in my village can only make it till middle school, and then they're forced to get married." 

"And then the only thing anyone cares about is that they give birth to boys!" adds Lara, who has now spent over a year as a Big Sister in the project's mentoring program.

Even more exciting is when these awakenings lead to action, as they have in Lara's case. Now 22 years old, she has made her point to the doubters.

"I'm older than all my brothers, and I've always felt that my father wished I'd been a boy in order to help him farm and be his backbone," she says. "I was like any other girl — I just used to listen to how he felt about it without doing anything about it!"

After learning of her own equality and rights, Lara says she became more confident. 

"I decided to go talk to my father and asked to help him on the farm. His jaw dropped — he didn't know what to say, and I insisted that he give me a chance to prove myself."

"I went with him and I drove the tractor, harvested the crops, mowed the field, and even fed the cattle. My father was amazed at what I could do; I've practically proved to him that girls are the equal of boys and even better!"

Not content with the horizons of the family farm, Lara has set her sights on higher education. Since finding her own confidence — and her father's — she has moved on to study graphic design at a local college. 

This is how the Valuable Girl Project sets about and succeeds in transforming girls and young women. Involving them in the Big-Little Sister mentoring is only the first step; beyond that are leadership training and coaching that instill even greater confidence and self-worth.

The results become evident in how the girls think of themselves and others. 

For example, monitoring the attitudes of the Valuable Girls over time reveals that nearly every one experiences an increased sense of self-efficacy — the belief in their capacity to act and thereby achieve what they want to achieve. Overwhelmingly, they also report increased agreement with the concept that males and females should have equal access to social, economic, and political opportunities.

These changes in attitudes are crucial to transforming not just individual lives, but also communities and societies. As Lara says:

"I've proved to my neighbors and other community members that girls are not weak and useless; they're human beings of equal value and have the same rights and duties."

With your support, Lara and our Valuable Girls will continue making progress towards claiming the same rights and opportunities as their fellow citizens. In doing so, they'll make a better world for their daughters!

You know how strongly traditions have a hold on parts of Egypt, particularly remote villages in poverty-stricken areas. It's hard for girls there to speak out.

Fortunately, as more and more young women begin to feel empowered, this is changing. And you have a role in this change, because your support has allowed initiatives like the Valuable Girl Project to strengthen their courageous voices. Thank you!

Today, it's great to have the chance to share the results of the Valuable Girl Project through the personal testimony of Salma. Her experience sums up so much of what the project aims to achieve by promoting education and nurturing self-worth and self-expression. Here's what she recently told Coptic Orphans staff:

"My name is Salma. I am 21 years old. I am from Assiut.

There are many oppressive traditions and customs where I live, especially for girls my age. Fathers use these traditions and customs to dominate their daughters and control their future. I didn't really realize that's how it is, until I finished my high school education exam with a score that allows me to go to law school.

It has always been my dream to be a lawyer and stand before the court. Although I submitted my application to enroll in law school, I couldn't go, because of my father. He decided to ignore my dream of going to college so that he could afford to put my brothers through high school. I had to stay at home, and I was psychologically distressed and didn't like talking to anyone. I stayed at home for a long time.  

After a while, I heard from a neighbor about the Valuable Girl Project. In the beginning, I didn't feel like taking part, but when my mother saw me dejected about seeing my friends enrolled in college, she told me to go as a way of having fun.

I was accepted into the project and became a Big Sister. At first, I was kind of an introvert, but as the sessions went on, I started to engage in conversations and express my own opinions. I began building relationships with other girls in the project, and I got very interested in discussions and learning about my rights.  

Step by step, I began to regain my self-confidence and come out of my shell. What encouraged me the most is that my Little Sister started to make real progress with her education. I started to like the project, and the stipend for Big Sisters was my only hope of pursuing my university education. I saved money to be able to enroll without having to ask for financial aid.

The way I learned to mentor my Little Sister helped me pass an interview with a childcare facility. Now I save money from my stipend and from that job, and I can pursue my education, even after I'd lost hope. I re-submitted my application to law school and was accepted, and I'll start classes in September. Girls aren't helpless anymore. I will learn and teach others."

Stories like Salma's confirm that what Egypt's young women need is not handouts, but a chance - a chance that you provide when you support the Valuable Girl Project to bring them educational opportunities. Thank you!

*Name changed to protect the privacy of the Valuable Girl.

This time last year, I wouldn't have expected to be able to deliver an update like this one. But here it is:

Not only did Samia get excellent grades, but her Big Sisters improved the literacy rates in her hometown!

You may remember Samia from my letter last November. She's the kid who entered the Valuable Girl Project with a chip on her shoulder — cursing, stealing, and hitting the other girls.

The project's Big Sister-Little Sister model, which creates one-to-one mentoring relationships, seemed to do Samia a world of good. She stopped hitting people, learned social skills, and started making friends.

Samia's transformation, which I mentioned last fall, reached another milestone this summer. During my visit, one of the project coordinators handed me Samia's report card, which she'd proudly shared with her role models.

"EXCELLENT" grades in Arabic, math, and science!

When I saw those grades, I wondered if Samia's father knew about this huge achievement. Her dad is behind bars for life, more or less. Would he be proud that Samia is making progress toward escaping his generation's cycle of violence and poverty?

Seeing Samia's grades confirmed for me, once again, that kids from the poorest households (even those where they're more likely to be hit than hugged) can be transformed by education, love, and respect.

But girls can't flourish in a community that's crumbling. That's why the Valuable Girl Project also aims to be a resource to the cities and villages where it operates.

It's a good start to provide, as the project does, a safe space for the Big Sisters and Little Sisters to learn together, particularly when the pairs are Christians and Muslims.

But to really have an impact, other effects have to ripple outward from the project's five sites in Upper and Lower Egypt. This summer, I found out about an exciting way that this aspiration became a reality.

Here's what happened: The community development association that hosts Samia's site discovered that many students in the area couldn't read or write, despite being enrolled in school. In response, they organized a special training program in literacy tutoring skills.

The association approached the project's Big Sisters, and 18 of them participated in the training. Next, the girls volunteered in a local literacy initiative. Together, they taught reading and writing to 200 kids! A pre- and post- evaluation of the children’s reading skills showed an average improvement of 60%.

It felt good to hear this, knowing that literacy has a huge positive impact on a child's life chances. Not only that, but the Valuable Girl Project had benefited not just one girl, Samia, but an entire community.

I love that the Valuable Girl Project's effects are beginning to radiate outward, from individual lives to communities. That's the power of education and respect. When we give them to girls, they shine!

It’s a muggy day in Matay, but no one hesitates to hug and crowd together for a photo. Here in Middle Egypt, girls and young women are used to the heat. It’s just another challenge for these participants in the Valuable Girl Project, like coping with run-down schools, making ends meet in a tough economy, and making their voices heard in a male-run society.

Only a few of these challenges are familiar to today‘s visitors to this Valuable Girl site — they’re volunteers from abroad, here in Egypt to take part in Coptic Orphans’ Serve to Learn program. They‘re spending three weeks teaching English to kids in Matay, and they may have gotten used to sweltering heat. But because they’re from places where the schools are more functional, the economy more developed, and patriarchy less pronounced, it’s harder to familiarize them with what it’s like to be a girl in Egypt.

Nevertheless, the two project coordinators, Sawsan and Doaa, do their best. There are smiles on both sides as their description unfolds of the Valuable Girl Project. In Port Said, Matay, Armant, Sohag and Luxor, the volunteers learn, 142 Little Sisters and 142 Big Sisters meet twice a week. The older sister mentors the younger one in schoolwork and life skills; the coordinators teach them the value of teamwork, creativity, planning, and accepting others. Many times, the Big-Little Sister relationships are Christian-Muslim, offering an important bridge between people whose paths might not otherwise cross.

The Valuable Girl Project participants, in turn, find out what brings this gaggle of foreigners to Egypt. They hear how the volunteers are lured from around the world by the chance to see the real Egypt, form close relationships with Egyptian children, and be transformed by their love. They learn how the volunteers are inspired by the kids, even as they teach a love of learning with fun educational activities.

The most interesting thing about today’s encounter is how it reflects the fruition of three projects. The Serve to Learn volunteers have also been meeting the mothers of the fatherless children served by Coptic Orphans. It’s precisely because of those mothers that the Valuable Girl Project exists.

The story is this: The more Coptic Orphans staff got engaged with the orphans’ families, the more they began to see a really striking trend. Mothers were dying — denying themselves medical care — because they felt valueless and were using what little money they had to meet their children’s needs. But of course, a healthy child requires a healthy mother. Stopping this destructive cycle seemed desperately important, so a decade ago the Valuable Girl Project was founded.

Since that time, the Valuable Girl Project has been working with girls to ensure they stay in school, believe in themselves, and become healthy mothers.

So now the Serve to Learn volunteers have the full story: from the fatherless children they’ve met, to their mothers, to the young women that the Valuable Girl Project aspires to put on a different path. It’s a path that’s heavy on studying, and soon the girls head back inside to continue learning together. Meanwhile, the volunteers are back on the road to the school where they teach their kids. Education, education, education — that’s the key.

Links:

• http://www.copticorphans.org/blog/2015/05/valuable-daughters/

• The Valuable Girl Project meets Serve to Learn. (DOCX)