By Reanne Olivier & Farai Mubaiwa | Co-Founders
Introduction
Africa is young and female, with women making major contributions to Africa’s economic growth through farming and entrepreneurship. Over the last few years, the continent has seen tangible improvements in the gap between men and women through Women Empowerment initiatives such as equal rights to primary education and gender mainstreaming in parliaments. The ShE Is Empowered Program (ShE) is a one year, non-residential, online development program for young African women and girls, focused on leadership and mentorship of soft skills development, social entrepreneurship, advocacy, African feminisms, and more. At the end of the program, participants emerge with a strong network of other young African women leaders, mentors, a certificate of participation, newly acquired skills and the support of the AMI team to run social impact programs in their communities. For the 2022 cohort, 20 young African women between ages 18-29 will form part of this program from the following countries: Ghana, Rwanda, Lesotho, Uganda, Malawi, Eswatini, Egypt, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone.
ShE Team Update
This year the program will be run by a program lead, Qondisa Sibeko based in South Africa and two program assistants, Yara Hamed based in Egypt and Kubepo Saul, based in Botswana (who was a ShE Leader from the cohort of 2020-2021).
Selection Process
The application process for the ShE Cohort for 2022 began in February with applications opening on 4 February. In order to encourage application responses an Instagram live session was hosted by Kubepo Saul where she interviewed 2020-2021 ShE Leader Leonah Ndlovu on her experience of the program and where any program related questions were answered. By 9 March 2022 A total of 1336 applications were submitted, however, only 64 applications were fully completed, thus being the ones that were assessed. 7 AMI team members assessed applications between the 10th to the 17th of March. On the 18th of March 44 applicants were shortlisted. From Tuesday 22 March to Friday 1 April, 43 interviews were conducted with one applicant not scheduling an interview. On the 4th and 5th of April, a selection meeting was held to select the cohort. On the 5th of April 20 applicants were selected to be ShE leaders for 22. Unfortunately, not all countries made it into the final selection due to a very low number or low quality of applications from some countries.
Cohort of 2022
The average age of ShE leaders for the 2022 cohort is 24 years old. The following countries have ShE leaders represented:
Program Plan For the Year
The official cohort will be announced on all Africa Matters Initiatives social media platforms on Friday 15 April. The official opening ceremony will then commence on Tuesday 19 April.
Module sessions will be held once every second week on a day selected by the ShE Leaders. in 2021 it was a Thursday. Each session will be approximately 2 hours in the evening and will be run by a facilitator either from the AMI team or an external person invited by the ShE Team. A total of 15 Module sessions have been prepared on topics including: Personal Development, Soft Skills Building & Career Development, African Identities, African Leadership & Youth Development, African Feminisms, Cultural Differences & Similarities, Financial Literacy in Africa, Social Entrepreneurship, Global Citizenship, African Youth Advocacy with 5 modules focussed on planning the community engagement projects. Each ShE Leader is required to plan and execute a community engagement project aimed at bettering their community. A meaningful portion of the project should be executable during the program period but should ultimately continue once the program is completed.
All ShE Leaders will also be paired with an industry mentor with the goal to guide them in their growth as an individual and future changemaker on the African continent.
Conclusion
We are grateful to you for the support provided to the ShE is Empowered Program in 2021. And we hope that you will continue to support us with the new cohort of ShE leaders for 2022
Please continue to share details of this program among your networks to raise the full $5 000 needed for 2022. https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/she-is-empowered/
If you have any questions, concerns or suggestions, please feel free to contact us at she@africamattersinitiative.com
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