While women in the West have made significant progress in combating gender discrimination in recent decades, girls in Sierra Leone still face entrenched inequality, according to Rebecca Feldman, BC Law ’97.
Strong Girls, United Women hopes to change this reality.
Feldman co-founded the nonprofit Strong Girls, United Women (SGUW) with her sister-in-law Dorah Rains, as well as Tewoh Karimu and Sonia Koroma, Rains’ childhood best friends. The organization works exclusively in Sierra Leone to combat two major issues women face there— personal safety and poverty.
“Our number one goal in everything we do is to keep girls in school,” Feldman said.
Feldman currently serves as the chief operating officer of SGUW, and her team comprises women from both the United States and Sierra Leone. Feldman said the team members’ diverse backgrounds make for a unique variety of perspectives.
Driven by a longstanding passion for women’s empowerment, Rains said she joined forces with Feldman to bring the vision of SGUW to life.
“When I moved here after I had babies, I thought, ‘Okay, it’s about time to take action now,’” Rains said. “So I spoke with [Feldman]. Because she is a lawyer, she knows how to do the paperwork. I’m not from here. I’m not too familiar with the laws and all of these things. We started working together, and she was really excited.”
Both from Sierra Leone, Koroma and Karimu currently serve as regional directors for SGUW. Their experience living in Sierra Leone has helped many SGUW team members approach Sierra Leonean women with empathy and understanding.
“We know the struggles,” Rains said. “We know what we went through growing up in Sierra Leone, and what other girls are going through.”
SGUW implements a two-pronged approach to fulfill its mission of keeping girls in school, starting with the economic empowerment of Sierra Leonean women.
“It is hard for women in Sierra Leone to be economically empowered by themselves,” Rains said. “Mostly, women depend on men, which can be problematic. You don’t have a voice if you just depend on a man for everything, which has been like a cultural practice that women have been put through for many many years.”
SGUW empowers Sierra Leonean women by teaching sustainable, collective farming practices. Initially focused on rice farming, the organization has since expanded to include pineapple, corn, cassava, okra, and groundnuts.
“75 percent of the people of Sierra Leone work and are supported by agriculture, and that includes the majority of women in the country,” Feldman said. “We felt it important to work with those women and meet them where they are.”
Since its founding in 2020, SGUW’s rice farming program has reached over 180 women in agricultural fields surrounding Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital.
“We have stories of women telling us, ‘Since we’ve started this farming, now I can pay my child’s school fees, now I’m able to do something for myself,’” Rains said.
SGUW’s impact is not limited to the women they work with directly. In fact, Rains noted that encouraging sustainable farming has resulted in a positive cascading effect on surrounding communities.
“The amazing thing about this is that these women go and empower other women in nearby villages,” Rains said. “If they have, for example, too many seeds, they will go to the next village and give the women the seeds so that they too can benefit from what we are doing.”
Feldman said she is confident that by encouraging these women to take the first step toward economic empowerment, they will continue to thrive independently going forward.
“The community itself can continue beyond just the inputs of the nonprofit, they will be able to continue this themselves,” Feldman said. “We’ve seen such great results, in particular with agriculture.”
The success of this agricultural initiative has not only allowed women to support their families financially and nutritionally but has also contributed to SGUW’s main objective of keeping girls in school.
“This has allowed these rural families that don’t have access to very much cash keep their girls in school longer,” Feldman said. “It’s given them enough money to either hire somebody to help them on the farm, or enough money so that they can pay the school fees so that they can go to school.”
Attending school in Sierra Leone is, technically, free. In many cases, however, there are extra fees that prevent children from going. Uniforms and shoes are required for children to attend school—items that pose a financial burden for many families in Sierra Leone, which is considered one of the poorest countries in the world.
By allowing women to become more financially independent through sustainable agriculture, SGUW also allows them to send their children to school or go to school themselves. This initial step paves the way for the second part of SGUW’s dual approach, focused on initiatives within the schools themselves.
Koroma, the director of operations for SGUW’s Freetown office, works with schools in the Freetown area to inform girls about reproductive health, teaching about everything from HIV and AIDS to hygiene to early marriage prevention.
“We empower them, give them skills, and give them knowledge,” Koroma said. “We create a safe space, thereby, at the end of the day, they will learn skills and empower themselves and create revenue on their own.”
Pregnancy prevention is also a frequently discussed topic within the education program, as teen pregnancy rates in Sierra Leone are as high as 28 percent.
But since its founding, there have been zero reported teen pregnancy cases in SGUW partner schools, Feldman said.
“Our great pride is that we’ve never had a pregnant girl both come out of our program,” Feldman said. “We’re trying to prevent girls from getting married and girls from having babies until they’re old enough to be women and have started their life.”
Members of SGUW’s team said the program not only educates its participants but builds a community as well.
“We have a conducive environment where we talk, we talk like peers, we encourage them to talk about things that are happening in their homes,” Koroma said. “Some are being abused, but they are afraid to speak out. We create a safe space at SGUW, where these girls are encouraged to speak out.”
Much like its program to financially empower women, SGUW’s educational approach is about providing girls with the “first step” toward self-sufficiency, Feldman said.
“The girls learn a great deal, and they learn about community building and about supporting each other and respect and communication and critical thinking,” Feldman said. “We don’t tell them what to think, we tell them how to think. And that is the most important thing in education.”
Feldman also said that SGUW’s classes are not just an educational experience. These classes allow the girls to form lifelong bonds with one another and their mentors.
“There are some girls who were in our first classes five years ago who are still hanging around and helping us at the office,” Feldman said.
Over 200 girls have completed the classes so far, a number that Feldman hopes will continue to grow in the future.
“We’re incredibly popular in our schools,” Feldman said. “Every girl wants to be part of it. We practically have to pull names out of hats, so we’d love to expand it.”
According to Koroma, running a nonprofit in Africa can be difficult. At first, the principals of many schools were uncertain whether SGUW’s program would succeed, given the abundance of NGOs in Africa targeting similar issues.
“One of the reasons that development programs fail often, and the failure rate is staggeringly high, is that they come in with an idea, they bring the program with them someplace, and that tends to be a risky proposition,” Feldman said.
SGUW’s founders believe their success stems from their unique approach to working collaboratively within the communities it serves.
Before it begins serving a community, it releases questionnaires and surveys, engaging in informal conversations with people who live there. The team members speak to tribal leaders, religious leaders, teachers, parents, and anyone willing to speak with them about community problems.
“It is much less risky to go to a community and work with them and talk with them about what they see as potential solutions to problems in their community,” Feldman said. “We’re constantly augmenting, changing, adapting to conditions, to new people, to things that happen.
This method of communication has proven successful. Currently, 185 families are involved in SGUW’s rice farming project, 500 students have access to SGUW hygiene stations, and 200 students have been educated through health classes.
In the future, SGUW hopes to expand its efforts to other parts of Sierra Leone to help more girls and women in need.
“The goal is just for us to have funding to help more women and girls, more women in education and girls in agriculture,” Rains said. “We’re hopeful. We’re very positive, and it will happen one day. We believe in that.”
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