Empower 170 Malawian Girls to FINISH School

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!