Empower 170 Malawian Girls to FINISH School

This is Brenda. Brenda is a current AGE Africa scholar at Mulunguzi Secondary School who overcame many hurdles to get her education.  When she started secondary school, her family was unable to pay her school fees and it wasn't until her brother spoke with the Head of Mulunguzi that she was able to find AGE and continue her education.  Brenda's journey to education is remarkable, and strikingly similar to many of our AGE Africa scholars, but what sets her apart is her well-spoken dedication to others.  She has personal goals such as becoming a doctor, or perhaps a journalist, but regardless of which career she chooses, she has a few ultimate goals: to help her parents, relatives, friends and many more!  In her own words:

"If God is going to continue to bless me and help me acheive my goals, I want to help others, eg. orphans, elderly people, people with disabilities and many others.  I want to do this because I see the importance of helping others as AGE helped me to be where I am."

We see Brenda as such an inspiration! In our leadership curriculum, we help our scholars to see that they are role models in their communities and that they have the unique opportunity to make a difference by piloting village-based girls clubs, mentoring other girls and being an approachable leader--Brenda is well on her way to doing all of these things!

Brenda and many of our other scholars and alumnae also frequently express that they would like AGE Africa to continue doing what we're doing and to help as many girls as possible.  We're listening!  As we ask our scholars to serve as leaders and give back to their communities, we're also trying to support more girls. 

This year, with the help of an amazing 2013 Tri for Malawi Team, we're aiming to raise 100K to directly support 140 Malawian Girls getting their secondary education.  That's 140 new opportunities for community leadership, 140 lives changed forever, 140 students who can follow in the footsteps of our current students and alumnae like Brenda, Mary and Lesenia.

Since January of this year, AGE Africa has been supporting 120 students with secondary school scholarships and providing support for hundreds of others with our life skills and career guidance curriculum.  Having 120 students means that we succeeded.  We are able to help more young women than ever before and we hope to see that number grow by year end.  However, as much as we like to celebrate overall success, we encourage our student to celebrate individual successes and to support each other.  We'd like to take this opportunity to share with you some of our students individual successes because, as we teach in our life skills program, "together we aspire, together we achieve." For example:

• We now have 7 AGE alumnae currently enrolled in higher education
• We now have girls in 7 schools in 7 districts throughout Malawi
• AGE Scholar Christina was made Head Girl of Mulunguzi
• AGE Scholar Ndaziona became the newest Police Prefect of Mulunguzi

AGE Scholars have achieved a lot collectively in the past year as well.  Just before graduation time, AGE discovered that 100% of our boarding school students passed their MSCE's (exit exams)! On October 11th, they coordinated and participated in an event for International Day of the Girl, raising awareness in their communities and nationwide.  AGE Program Assistant Mphatso Zidana was featured on Good Morning Malawi, and village chiefs, Ministery of Education officials and reporters watched the girls perform skits about girls' empowerment, facilitate workshops on healthy decision making and gave testimonials about pursuing higher education.

The many successes we have enjoyed in the past few months prove that scholarships, career guidance and life skills training are an unbeatable combination in helping change the future of girls in Malawi and worldwide, and it is for this reason  that we are aiming to increase our number of scholarships to 140  by the end of 2013!