Thank you to all of those who donated to Shining Hope for Communities in the Girl Effect Challenge! Thanks to your generous contributions, the Girl Effect—an incredible movement promoting girl-focused programs—will now feature Shining Hope as one of the most innovative and impactful organizations working with girls and women worldwide. The Girl Effect has 17,500 followers on Twitter, 260,000 "likes" on Facebook and nearly 1,000,000 views on YouTube! And it isn't hard to see why the Girl Effect is so popular: watch this video to learn why.
As a featured Girl Effect organization, we will receive over $25,000 in funding for 2012, amazing exposure to Girl Effect followers all over the globe, and the chance to positively impact a lot of girls in Kibera!
Girls in Kibera deal with so much just to secure an education and protect their physical and emotional health. On top of the daily hardships that exist for those living in extreme poverty, young women in Kibera also face severely high rates of sexual assault and incest, and lack access to basic needs like food, shoes, clothing, and sanitary napkins.
Shining Hope is changing the lives of thousands of girls in Kibera through Shining Girls for Kibera, a self-named girls’ empowerment group. Shining Girls addresses the needs of adolescent girls in Kibera by giving them the training and resources they need to be economically self-sufficient.
In order to assist the Shining Girls in staying enrolled in school, they are provided with sanitary napkins, school uniforms, and school supplies. They are supported through a holistic program of entrepreneurship and vocational training, sexual health education, artistic opportunities, and more. Shining Hope’s goal is to help these young women become leaders for social change in the Kibera community. At the end of the day, Shining Girls gives adolescent girls in Kibera a safe space to share and just be teenagers!