From Life lessons to a Movement
How a Small After-School Club Is Turning into a Movement to Empower Girls
At a young age, the founder of Empowered Girls, Kellen Msseemmaa, understood that education was the only weapon she had against poverty. In Uganda, she worked hard in school so she could secure the future she wanted.
But the odds were against her.
Kellen was a child born to a teen mother. Because the culture frowns upon mothers staying in school, Kellen’s mother had to drop out and instead marry a much older man to help support her growing family. Kellen was the eldest of six, and had no inheritance and no educational future laid out for her.
Still, she persevered.
“From a series of miracles, I finished university,” Kellen tells us in a recent interview. “I moved to northern Tanzania where girls are marginalized by culture, society and systems. I realized that very few girls were believing in themselves. Most girls did not know their self-worth because of the culture that defines them. Their future was to just be wives and mothers.”
In rural Tanzania, girls are often the most marginalized and least likely to attend school. This is often due to child marriage and early pregnancies that keep them away from the classroom. And a lack of reproductive and sexual education means Tanzanian teens are more likely to become pregnant.
Struck by what she saw in Tanzania, and inspired by her mother’s story, Kellen made it her life’s work to help girls stay in school.
That’s why she launched Empowered Girls in 2011.
Empowered Girls is a non-governmental organization in rural Tanzania that helps girls stay in school by empowering them with life skills and sexual and reproductive health (SRH) education.
Kellen knows better than anyone that, “Education gives you a voice. Education gives you power; the power to fulfill your dreams, come out of poverty, and empower your family and community to be better.”
Through Empowered Girls, Kellen helps ensure that Tanzanian girls do not experience the same fate as her mother.
The nonprofit has three main goals:
- Enlighten girls about their bodies, worth, value, rights, and potential.
- Equip girls with tools to excel academically, to become leaders, and to overcome the different challenges they face in their societies.
- Empower girls with the courage and confidence they need to compete favorably and thrive.
Empowered Girls had humble beginnings. As an economics teacher, Kellen noticed that her girl-students were doing poorly and that they were dropping out due to early pregnancies. So she started an after-school program with the girls to try to understand why they were under-performing. Kellen found that it was because they had low self-esteem and didn’t know where to go when their rights were violated.
Eventually, Kellen’s program transformed into an after-school club for girls to build confidence and to access resources to help them achieve their educational goals. In 2020, Kellen officially founded Empowered Girls.
Today, the organization offers three programs: Capacity Building, Menstrual Hygiene Management, and Better Education Outcomes. Girl-students can attend weekly seminars led by Empowered Girls mentors on such topics as personal health, study skills, life skills, culture and traditions, leadership, mindset, goal-setting, healthy relationships, coping skills, and more. Empowered Girls is recently supported by the Ally Funder Alliance, an initiative by Girls Education Collaborative (GEC), to help them grow their work, networks and visibility. GEC is a US-based NGO working to support local changemakers using the power of girls’ education to drive social change.
“I’ve seen Empowered Girls at work,” says Guillemette Dejean, who runs GEC’s programs and partnerships. “Kellen, and all of her trainers, have an exceptional ability to communicate and engage with youth. Their world-class curriculum is deliberate and responsive, making the program a truly transformative experience for the majority of the girls who participate.” Guillemette adds that Kellen is a hero to the young women (and men!) who are in the Empowered Girls programs.
Teaching girls sexual and reproductive health helps them take control of their bodies and understand that they have the ability to become powerful women.
“We live in a patriarchal society, where girls are marginalized by culture and traditions,” Kellen tells us. “The girls feel like they don’t have power over their bodies, as they are raised to know they are at the bottom of the hierarchy, and that their body doesn’t belong to them — it belongs to the man who proposes to them. Empowering girls to know their sexual rights, and to know ‘This is my body, it belongs to me,’ empowers them to take charge of their bodies.”
Kellen’s young but growing organization not only teaches girls sexual and reproductive education, but it also provides them access to basic needs to help them stay in school, like menstrual-hygiene products and scholastic materials. It is often the lack of these basic materials that block a girl from her education.
Kellen tells us that most students come from rural, impoverished communities where menstruation is taboo, and families cannot afford even a box of pads. Many girls stay home from school during their period because they are embarrassed to attend class when they might have stains on their clothes. Consequently, girls often miss many days of class throughout the year and cannot catch up to their male peers.
Empowered Girls provides free menstrual-hygiene products to girl-students — and the impact is tremendous.
“Girls are now able to sit in class, and not just sit, but actively participate,” Kellen tells us. “They can go to the blackboard and try out an equation [without fear of menstrual stains on their clothes]. They can play sports and games, and they are able to attend school all the days of the week. This improves their confidence and their self-esteem as they don’t worry anymore about making themselves dirty. Now they know menstruation is not a disease or a curse. It’s biological and something we should embrace, because it’s something that gives us motherhood.”
Kellen is full of anecdotes of how Empowered Girls has helped students achieve their goals. She spoke of one such student named Angel who graduated last year at the top of her class. Before Empowered Girls, Angel was often taken advantage of by men who promised to help get her things she needed in exchange for sex. But with Angel joining Empowered Girls, she was able to obtain such basic needs as underwear and sanitary napkins.
“Now, Angel can tell men: ‘I don’t need your things. I know who I am, and if I don’t have something I need, I know where to go to ask for help,’ ” Kellen tells us proudly.
While it’s clear that Empowered Girls is helping students today, we wondered how it might have impacted Kellen’s mother in the past had she had access to such an amazing program.
“I want to reduce more of my ‘mom’ and increase more ‘Kellens’.”
“I remember my graduation day,” Kellen recalls. “My mother told me she stopped school because she got pregnant with me, but ‘Seeing you achieve your degree, it’s like I just got my degree today.’ My mom had to suffer a lot. Had she gone to school, she would have delayed having children, and she probably wouldn’t have had six children. Had she gone to school, we wouldn’t have missed food, she wouldn’t have had to dig the whole day just to harvest food that wasn’t even enough for the whole family — she would be able to have taken care of us better.”
When we asked Kellen what she hopes for the future of Tanzanian girls, she told us she hopes to create a movement of girls who are ready to stand up for each other, give back to their communities, and encourage other girls to do the same.
It’s already happening.
Alumni of Empowered Girls are now starting their own Empowered Girls clubs in universities and in other parts of Tanzania.
“The future of Tanzania I want to see is a movement of women and girls standing up for their rights, standing up for their education, and standing with each other to make the world a better place for girls and women.”