In the previous post I mentioned I would post the copy from our application to this year’s Roddenberry Foundation Prize. Here it is!
2020 Roddenberry Prize Application
Problem Statement: What is the problem you are solving for and how is your work addressing it?
While in Sierra Leone, on a work study placement through the University of Toronto, I met a local community leader named Esther Kanu. Esther is the founder of the Women in Action Development Program - a vocational school in Freetown. Esther's passion was inspiring. She founded Women in Action in the middle of the Blood Diamond civil war as a place for vulnerable women and girls to continue their education as violence destroyed the country's schools. When the conflict ended, the government sought out community leaders like Esther to function as hubs of the country's DDR (disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration) project to help child solders regain their childhood and continue their education. When I met Esther, the school had been in operation since 1996, but had plateaued. With support from an organization I founded, Esther's Echo, which serves as a fundraising platform for the school, we expanded to a new building, a second location in a rural region, and purchased a plot of farmland for Women in Action to use as an income generation project. The problem is that the school is still using rented buildings which causes huge portions of our fundraising to go to rent subsidies. To ensure the long-term sustainability of this grassroots project, we want to construct a building in Freetown for Esther to use as a permanent location for the school, its students, and staff so that further donations can be used to expand the program rather than to offset expenses.
Communities Served
Sierra Leone remains of the poorest nations in the world. That poverty disproportionately impacts women and children. When the Women in Action Development Program was first founded by Esther Kanu in Freetown. it focused primarily on young women and girls. Since then, she has expanded the program to consider the entire life cycle of student education. In addition to youth, the school now features a day care centre. This allows for younger children to begin earlier at the centre as well as adult mothers, who otherwise would be at home caring for children, to attend classes. Graduates of the school have formed an alumni organization called the "Old Girls Club" which we use to track progress of graduates. 2019 was our first year serving a similar demographic in the rural region of Port Loko about 90km from Freetown
Strategy
The Women in Action Development Program tailors its vocational curriculum to maximize employability upon graduation. Esther, alongside her teaching staff, adjust the curriculum to suit changing times. For example, when the school first began, its core classes were English language training, tailoring, cosmetology, and food catering services. While training the students, the school also took on catering contracts within the community to sustain itself reducing student fees and raising funds to cover rents, materials, and teacher salaries. Since its founding, Women in Action has expanded to include computer instruction such as word processing and Internet literacy, mathematics, and an electrical engineering course which is a joint program with the Milton Margai College of Education and Technology.
Existing as a community organization separate from the national school system allows us to engage students who wouldn't otherwise have an opportunity to be educated. For example, it was national policy until just this past March that pregnant women and girls could not attend school in Sierra Leone. While the repeal of this harmful policy is a significant change for the country, Women in Action was able to sidestep this legislation for years ensuring that those who most needed a chance at education could receive it.
A new strategy we are planning to roll-out is the inclusion of a micro-finance project, run by Esther's daughter Samuella Kanu, a recent university graduate, that would support newly minted alumni of the school looking to start their own businesses and other entrepreneurial initiatives.
Impact
Esther has often spoken to me of her own life path; one that she hopes to spare other young women. Esther was forced into marriage at a young age, expected to bear children, was unable to complete her own education until later in life, and is a survivor of female genital mutilation. She speaks of poverty, and life in a post-conflict zone which disproportionately affects women and girls. Her own inspiration for Women in Action was to create an alternative path for women and girls in her own community. I want to amplify Esther's impact. Through Women in Action, Esther has already changed hundreds of lives by providing critical skills and an opportunity for employment, self-employment, and future post-secondary education.
In 2012, we brought Esther to Canada, her first-time outside Africa, to speak at Capilano University. In 2014, the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone forced Women in Action to cease its income generating activities. Our fundraising efforts helped weather the outbreak (which may likely happen again with COVID19) and facilitated a reopening later that year. In 2016, we helped Esther transition Women in Action to a new location when the previous landlord demolished the building where the school was founded. In 2017, we helped facilitate the purchase of a new plot of farmland for the school, and this past year we helped with the expansion to the Port Loko location. Since we formed our partnership with Esther, we have helped over 450 young women graduate.
Innovative
After meeting Esther, I felt that the international aid framework was top heavy with respect to the prevalence of large foreign non-profit organizations. I first arrived in Sierra Leone in 2004 just following the end of the Blood Diamond civil war. Sierra Leone was still in ruins. The country was seen as fertile ground by international organizations that descended upon the country. The work was fragmented and many of these large organizations did not coordinate efforts with one another creating redundancy in some regions and an absence of support in others. Amid these efforts were local leaders with grassroots initiatives that were overlooked by large international entities - initiatives such as Esther's. When I returned to Canada, I wanted to focus on supporting a local community leader like Esther who had first-hand knowledge of her own community, its resources, and would always be present to do the work in contrast to the often ephemeral nature of foreign aid. Rather than passive victims, we want to demonstrate the entrepreneurial spirit of people like Esther Kanu which is why our organization's slogan is "Telling a Different Story of Africa."
Suitability
I met Esther Kanu in 2004. I was still an undergraduate student at the time studying International Development at the University of Toronto. Esther changed the way that I looked at development by showing me that achieving the deepest connection with a community requires a relationship with the established leaders of those communities. Esther had founded Women in Action in 1996 during the midst of the Sierra Leone civil war. She built the school literally from nothing. When I returned to Canada in 2005, we setup informal fundraisers for Esther at the university. But I decided to formally register Esther's Echo as a Canadian non-profit organization in 2012. We've cultivated a relationship with Esther over all these years as our community partner in Sierra Leone. She's like family now to me. And I believe our relationship makes us suited to scale-up her project.
Long-Term Vision:
I often feel that we're moving against an escalator with Women in Action. Much of our fundraising is lost to overhead costs with the school - the largest being rent. This whole time that Esther has been championing the Women in Action Development Program, she has used rented buildings. We've tried to make the most of these situations by subletting spaces within these buildings to generate revenue but this ultimately leads to lost classroom space. The only way to truly scale Esther's project is to build their own school building. Once Esther has access to her own facility, funds that were directed toward rent could be diverted to paying teacher salaries, offsetting the costs of school fees paid by students, or invested in new teaching supplies and equipment. Ultimately the sustainability of the project is enhanced. Furthermore, having our own facility creates greater stability of the program. We'll no longer be at the mercy of landlords who may choose to evict the school because of other plans, which has happened to us in the past.
