Girls in Muhuru Bay are bombarded by these social messages. WISER held a body mapping workshop in January 2012 in order to help girls remember their power, voice, and dreams in the face of ubiquitous social messages that try to limit their potential. Body mapping has girls outline their bodies on cloth and identify the external, negative social messages they receive. These messages are countered by writing inside their body outline what they really believe about themselves and the value of a girl: “I have a right to education.” “I have power in my mind.””I am a quality woman, more than the quantity of two cows.” “Girls are courageous.” “Girls can make their own choices.” “Girls have the right to express themselves.” Completed body maps will be featured on our website and auctioned to raise funds for girls’ scholarships. Stay tuned!

Help support 30 new girls at WISER. Donate today to keep them in school.

Because with your support they have beds, clothes, and shoes. Because with your support they can, for the first time in their lives, learn in safety and be taken care of when they are sick. For the first time they have hope that they can be doctors, nurses, and businesswomen, and realize ambitions they have only dreamed of.

December 2011.

Dear WISER Supporter,

With your help we have made great progress in improving life in Muhuru Bay.  However, as we grow to include 90 girls in our signature secondary school program, 700 boys and girls in our primary school program, and extend clean water to 20,000 people throughout the Muhuru Bay community, our costs are increasing.  We hope you will be able to match or even increase your gift from previous years to support WISER in its continued growth and success.

You have been there for WISER girls in the past.  Every donation helps. Help us buy mosquito nets, sanitary pads, soap, and books.  Help us feed them, give them beds to sleep on, and clean water to drink.  Help us give them the education they deserve. Then they will do the rest, helping their community become economically sound and healthy. Help a WISER girl become a leader this holiday season.

Please give today.  Keep these girls, and 30 more in the new year, smiling, joyful, and hopeful.

Donations can be made online  and checks can be mailed to WISER, attn Karen Gray, Box 90519, Duke Global Health Institute, Durham NC 27708-0519.

We thank you, they thank you, and their community thanks you.

Sherryl Broverman, Chair WISER NGO

Nike’s Charity Fund Seeks to Help Unleash the ‘Girl Effect’

By Caroline Bermudez

In many parts of the world, girlhood is a blip, a brief period in one’s life that gives way quickly to more serious matters such as marriage and childbearing. Millions of girls undergo these rites of passage with silent assent. They have no control within their needy families, for whom betrothal means the acquisition of livestock, fabric, or money essential to their survival.

Some, like Anita Kumari of Bihar, India, speak out. They refuse to accept their fates. At 15, Anita enrolled in a training program to become a beekeeper, the only woman amid a group of men in their 40s. When her parents tried to arrange a marriage for her, she waged a hunger strike—and won. Today, Ms. Kumari is paying her way through college by operating her own beekeeping business.

With the help of Going to School, a New Delhi organization that seeks to deter dropouts, and its Be! an Entrepreneur program, Anita Kumari smashed every expectation foisted upon her.

Around the world, efforts like Going to School have benefited from the support of the Nike Foundation’s Girl Effect program, which promotes education, health, and economic self-sufficiency for girls.

“Adolescent girls in poverty face dead ends and we gotta get to them before that happens, so that’s the inspiration for this work,” says Maria Eitel, president of the foundation, a grant-making arm of the athletic-wear company. Girl Effect began in 2008, when the Nike and NoVo foundations announced they would collaborate to help girls. NoVo is the foundation created by Peter Buffett, a son of the philanthropist Warren Buffett.

Ms. Eitel says Girl Effect was born out of her feeling that the foundation should tackle larger issues, and she settled on poverty. Through the advice of two board members—A. Michael Spence, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, and Jill Ker Conway, the former Smith College president—Ms. Eitel decided that girls would become a foundation priority.

The grant maker works with organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the United Nations Foundation to support programs that prevent child marriage, pregnancy, and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, and most important, put girls in charge of their own destinies. The foundation’s largest presence is in Ethiopia, where it supports Berhane Hewan, a project of the Population Council that has helped 11,000 girls avoid child marriage. It granted approximately $17-million to the program during its 2011 fiscal year.

One foundation grantee says that Nike has played a major role in putting girls at the forefront of international issues. Gannon Gillespie, director of external relations at Tostan, a Washington charity that holds educational workshops in human rights, health, and literacy in African communities, says that “the girls agenda is on the table in a way it didn’t used to be.”

And that is how Ms. Eitel hopes it remains. Girl Effect, she says, “brings to life this very simple but powerful idea [that] the least powerful person on the planet can transform it.”

http://philanthropy.com/article/Nike-s-Charity-Fund-Seeks-to/129386/

At 13 years old her teachers contacted her father and told him about her great academic potential and asked him to support her during the year she took her national exams. Floviance earned a very high grade and was accepted into secondary school, but her father refused to pay for her and told her to get married instead. Floviance convinced him to give her another year to take the exams again and once more scored very highly. That year WISER opened and gave Floviance a full scholarship to secondary school.  Now about to start her third year at WISER, Floviance is one of the top performing girls.

View Duke Chronicle Article >

WISER believes that the best and most lasting social and economic change is only possible when girls are educated, self-confident, and economically autonomous. WISER is proud to be part of the movement, recognized by the Nobel committee, to give girls and women the power to engage in social change, work for peace, and improve the living conditions in their country.

Originally posted on February 5, 2010

Highlights from this red-letter day are featured in a new video. Watch it now:

February 1, 2010 dawned brightly on the WISER campus in Muhuru Bay when Principal Dorcas Oyugi and the five inaugural teachers welcomed the Class of 2013 to Day One of classes.

Accompanied by their families, friends, and community members, 30 excited students—many being the first person in their family to attend secondary school– arrived at sunrise. They quickly moved to their dormitory rooms and received their personalized school lockers filled with uniforms, textbooks, school supplies, and personal care products.

Since the opening ceremony a few weeks ago, Principal Oyugi and her teachers have been readying the classrooms and lessons in anticipation of the students’ arrival.

Kiswahili/Geography teacher Grace Messopir remarked, “This is a once in a lifetime moment where we, together with the students, have become pioneers toward change.”

WISER proudly has the first and only white boards in the classrooms and the highest ratio of microscopes per student in the science laboratory—one for every two students—in any secondary school in Nyanza Province.

Each WISER teacher serves as a house advisor to six students. The teachers chose the names of the houses to inspire the students as individuals and teams. The houses wisely bear the names Magnificent, Mirror, Vivacious, Integrity, and Savvy.

Andy Cunningham, WISER’s Executive Director and Co-Founder, exclaimed in an email to his fellow Co-Founders Dr. Sherryl Broverman and Dr. Rose Odhiambo, “As I watched each girl walk into her classroom and sit at her own desk on her own chair, I began to imagine the possibilities that await all of us. Could we be looking at the first female Kenyan president? Absolutely! Could there be the next African Nobel Peace Prize winner in our midst? Absolutely!”

WISER continues the commitment to support all of our students with a full scholarship, even as each new class enters our school until we enroll 120 girls.

To help us, please click on Donate Now.