Pictured: Members of the JLMC Uganda Team getting ready to broadcast the first Girl Power Hour!
What do you do in Uganda when you can’t reach girls where they are? When schools are closed down and girls are more vulnerable than ever because they’re stuck at home in increasingly unsafe environments?
Well, you do what we’ve all learned to do lately: you meet with them virtually!
However, In rural Uganda, internet connectivity is still highly unreliable and the vast majority of young girls do not have access to a device with streaming or video capability.
So, if you’re super industrious like our Just Like My Chid Uganda team, you take to the airwaves via radio — still a very popular medium in rural Uganda.
Last week Country Director Audrey Kanyesigye launched the first of a series of Girl Power Hour Radio Show segments aimed at sharing Girl Power Project curriculum with adolescent girls and the communities in which they live.
The signal strength covers three districts that we work in – Luwero, Nakaseke and Nakasongla – and will be aired every Thursday until the end of the year covering different lessons of the Girl Power Project Curriculum.
The first episode featured girl power mentor- 17-year-old Swabulah Nassuna (pictured above) who is also a JLMC Mandela scholar.
She talked about how much she learned from the Girl Power Project on health, confidence, following her dreams and that her primary focus is now education rather than getting married and pregnant. She also vowed to continue to empower other girls to do the same. Girl Power graduates mentoring other girls is the “good kind of virus” that has spread rapidly through our communities.
In fact, during the “call in” portion of the show, a caller asked the JLMC team to assist police and community members in intercepting a forced child marriage between a 45-year-old man and an adolescent girl (watch below). Forced child marriage is illegal in Uganda, and yet it is heavily practiced when families and children don’t know their rights or how to enforce them. This immediate success of educating the community at large is exactly the impact we are hoping to achieve.
