18twenty8 empowers young women, between the ages of 18 and 28, by developing strategies for their educational and personal development. We encourage our beneficiaries to view higher education as an attractive and necessary tool for their long-term empowerment. Our leadership development programme for undergraduate young women address the challenges that they contend with at university and enable them to graduate as resilient leaders.
Despite women making up more than 50% of the South Africa's total population, gender representivity is still below the 50% mark especially for positions that have significant influence, such as C-suite roles in listed companies, the judiciary and state-owned enterprises.Female students who hold positions of leadership generally shy away from participating actively in decision making and implementation. This signaled a need to inculcate a "lead without title" mindset amongst the female students
18twenty8 has created a leadership programme to empower young women at undergraduate level to be well-rounded graduates who will make meaningful contributions as leaders across all sectors of South African economy. Our holistic leadership programme stimulates vibrant dialogue between undergraduate young women, their peers and role models on the multiple and inter-related issues that they encounter in their daily lives.
Empower 200 undergraduate young women to: foster a culture of active citizenry in young undergraduate women, fuel gender transformation by providing access to opportunities and ongoing support through mentors, role models and positive influencers, harness young women's ability to participate actively as decision makers in university structures, their homes and communities; and build confidence, self-awareness and social-consciousness in young women through the Ubuntu values-based system.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).