Girls' Empowerment

Dawwie: Girls' Empowerment

So much has been happening in the past few weeks that I’m excited to share. I began working on a girls’ empowerment project called Dawwie, which in Arabic means “a loud voice with an impact.” This project is spearheaded by Egypt’s NCCM (National Council on Childhood and Motherhood), and UNICEF has been providing them with technical support by designing toolkits that can be used by facilitators to implement empowerment programs. Since the UNFPA works jointly with UNICEF on eliminating FGM, and this is an issue that is so closely tied to girls’ empowerment, we are also supporting the project. I have been tasked with helping to develop the toolkit, which includes programs such as Storytelling for Empowerment, Interactive Community Theater, Intergenerational Dialogue and Digital Literacy. 

Banner for the Dawwie program

I’m excited for this opportunity because it relates so closely to my previous job that I loved and that inspired me to pursue social work. For four years I ran an after-school young women’s leadership program with first and second generation immigrant adolescents in Queens, New York. This job allowed me the creative freedom to design curricula that appealed to young women and guided them in developing their voices, self-advocacy skills and leadership qualities. I facilitated the sessions, mentored the youth and got to see them grow into confident, empowered leaders, which made the job so fulfilling. Now with Dawwie, I have an opportunity to contribute this experience and knowledge to a national-level project. Having been on the direct-service side, I feel that I am able to keep the facilitators' and participants’ needs at the forefront as I design a programming toolkit that they can adapt to each of their specific circumstances. 

I am also learning about the similarities and differences between designing girls’ empowerment programs in Egypt’s cultural context and an American context. I am finding that there are so many similarities in terms of approach and content between the programming I did in Queens and what they are implementing in Egypt, more than I expected. I have the opportunity to really learn from experts here about how to be culturally-sensitive when working with the nuances of a different context. 

To briefly share a couple of other projects I’ve been working on over the past couple of weeks, I have been writing concept notes for two proposals:

- Advocating for the funding of more in-depth qualitative research on the social and behavior drivers of FGM in Egypt, particularly addressing the trend of medicalization in which doctors are increasingly conducting the procedure and therefore legitimizing it, despite nation-wide religous condemnations from Muslim and Christian leaders and the instensifying legal criminalization of FGM. 

- A Photovoice project in which girls from areas of Egypt with a high prevalence of FGM and other harmful practices are trained in photo-documenting their daily lives in order to develop their voices and critical consciousness, while providing first-hand insights into their lives for policy-makers to understand and consider when creating policies that impact them. 

Touring the country

In the meantime my intern buddies and I have been spending our weekends exploring the numerous historical sites of Cairo, including the churches of Coptic Cairo, the mosques of Old Cairo, and the Upper (Southern) Egyptian towns of Luxor and Aswan, where the most incredible monuments of Ancient Egypt remain! The history and beauty of the entire country has been unfolding before my eyes and leaving me in complete awe. We also went to a football match for the Africa Cup of Nations, which was an exhilarating and unforgettable experience of Egypt’s national pride. 

The Salah El-Din Citadel of Cairo and Muhammad Ali Pasha Mosque

Africa Cup of Nations Game at Cairo International Stadium: Egypt vs. Uganda

Temple of Horus in Aswan, Temple of Queen Hatshepsut in Luxor

This week I am off to spend a week with the Youth team at a training in the gorgeous Mediterranean city of Alexandria. I will share updates in the coming weeks. I am also at the halfway point of this summer experience, and want to give a shout-out to the United Nations Association of New York (UNA-NY) for its generous support of this opportunity. So far this internship has been an incredible experience that would not have been conceivable without the UNA-NY Summer Scholars program.