Boxgirls International

Boxgirls' goal is the empowerment of girls & women. Inspiring them to take on an active role in their community and participate in the much needed structural social changes, that not only ensures the basic human rights to all girls and women but also give them a true equal chance for success and happiness all over the world. As women and girls are still challenged by discrimination and gender based violence in far too many places, Boxgirls' started to aim to encourage what we believe the very basis for freedom: the trust, that you deserve to be indepent, free and happy, the trust in yourself.

Over the years we developed our progammes and went from sports to other empowering methods such as presentation and media trainings, first aid and pc skills trainings and from after school gym times to school and social work projects as well as afternoon and weekend trainings in self-defense, boxing, running, fitness and very recently yoga.

Despite all the success we had, we too often found ourselves lost in front of the big challenges these girls and women have to face: What do you do, when one women you know, loses her child because she cannot afford the medicine? How can you compensate, when the girls are all inspired and motivated, but can't afford schooling anymore? We found, that we can always find a way to help individual women, just by investing more of our time, effort and money on top of our regular work. We worked harder, bugged our friends and acqaintances more, got more funders. But we came to know very soon, that there is a basic problem at hand, we just had to find a way to solve, if we will ever want to have a chance to get on top of all this issues.

The basic problem? Money. Money equals independence. So, how do you combine a body based learning programme with a business training? And what could we really provide? Our experience with pc workshops, from which the internet café and learning institute  from Boxgirls Nairobi arose, gave us an idea as well as the girls, who went through our programmes and found a job afterwards, because they could impress their future employers with their clear-headedness and soveregnity despite their lack of formal education.

So we spent 2010 thinking about curriculas and workshops to create a basis, from which Boxgirls can offer workshops in microbusinesses alongside our regular offers.

Prof. Dr. Heather Cameron gave an insight of this project already last September, at the International Conference for Sport and Development at the UWC in Cape Town "Beyond 2010".

In November and March/April, Prof. Cameron spent time in Cape Town again, to bring the last bits together and start the new project, which is set up to train women and girls to become entrepreneurs and get a good economical basis knowledge. Aim is: Only a women who can earn, administer and protect her own money has a chance to be her own women.