Jessica Posner Odede is CEO of Girl Effect, an international NGO working with adolescent girls, using digital technology. Speaking to Times Evoke, Odede discussed the challenges rural girls face globally, using social media to distribute life-altering information — and why corporates should back the efforts of girls going digital:
How did Girl Effect (GE) come about?
Well, GE has been a pioneer in the last 15 years, in understanding and investing in adolescent girls. We were started by the Nike Foundation and recently, we’ve become an independent non-profit globally.
We are driven by this idea that adolescent girls globally were simply not a part of the world’s conversations or of the world’s development agenda. Part of our earliest innovation was thinking of how to show the world that if you change the life of an adolescent girl, you also change her community and the world at large.
74140857
GE works in over nine countries today, including the US and the UK, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Malawi and Nigeria. We also have a mobile platform available in over 60 countries. We bring together the power of young people wanting to change things about themselves and to change their lives.
Read also: Times Evoke on redefining ‘her’
What are the different technologies you’re using?
Well, young people today are on their phones because they want to be where things are happening — that’s online. So, we create a content experience, giving them more than just information — we get to their aspirations
If you imagine a young girl in the outskirts of, say, Jaipur, perhaps the first girl in her family to make it to secondary school, she doesn’t have anyone to guide her, her parents don’t know how to help her… she feels lost. Very alone.
We’re therefore reaching girls on YouTube, TicTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and SMS. We’d love to see young girls taking control of their futures. They need to understand health. They need to know how to stay in school. How to start earning and saving. So, we create videos which are almost like a big sister.
Girls come online and get answers to questions they often can’t ask anyone. In India, we’ve launched our platform ‘Chhaa Jaa’, targeting adolescent girls. We equip a girl with knowledge on how to keep herself safe, acquire skills, even tell her parents, ‘I want to enrol for a particular vocational training course’, when her parents think, no, she should just get married.
74141222
But globally, don’t girls have much less access to mobile technology?
That’s a very important question. We’ve done ground-breaking research with the Vodafone Foundation here. Globally, boys are 1.5 times more likely than a girl to own a phone — but, in the last three years, the number of girls accessing a phone has tripled. And in the next three years, it’s going to triple again.
Today, even in rural India, girls may not own their own phone. But they’re borrowing a phone, from their mother, brother or friend. Girls in India, from the lower end of the socioeconomic pyramid, are getting online at least twice a week — and consuming at least six hours of video content
You mentioned corporates. But don’t corporates also create constricting gender stereotypes?
In India, over 70% internet users today are men. Less than 30% women are internet users now — but this is also the area of future growth. In the next three to five years, this is where a vast untapped opportunity exists. Young adolescent girls are going to be the next wave coming online.
So, corporates should empower their decision-making, also because it’s good business. This is your next consumer frontier. So, you should enable them to have much better lives by knowing how to study, get a job, learn and earn.
Leave a Reply