THRIVEGulu
Empowering At-Risk and In-Need Adolescent Girls
Fast Facts
Uganda
Ann McStay and Brad Smith
2022-23, 2024, 2025
Education
How THRIVEGulu Is Making a Difference
THRIVEGulu helps refugees heal from the traumatic effects of war, gender-based violence, displacement, and extreme poverty.
Refugee youth experience disadvantages that adversely affect their economic stability: lack of education, limited access to information, and language barriers. For adolescent girls subject to gender-based violence, THRIVEGulu created Girl Shine (GS) to train girls in safety skills, sexual and reproductive health, peer-to-peer support networks, and increased confidence. The recent expansion of Girl Shine equips adolescent girls with practical skills for household financial security and helps them develop business plans for entrepreneurial success.
What THRIVEGulu Does
- Provides refugees, especially girls and young women, with education in life skills, financial literacy, entrepreneurship and vocational careers.
- Gathers information on girls’ needs, questions and challenges — especially in achieving economic empowerment — and includes these concerns and their solutions to enhance the GS curriculum.
- Publishes a financial literacy and basic business practices manual in Acholi (the local Ugandan language), Juba Arabic (South Sudanese), and English.
- Explains complex concepts like saving, investing, and budgeting, while reflecting the realities of the local context.
- Provides coaching in developing business plans and creating micro-enterprises that will increase girls’ income and financial stability.
- Develops avenues for sharing the program with NGOs working with refugees in other refugee settlements.
Initiatives Supported by Project Redwood
2022-23: $30,000 to help fund design, drafting, translation and publishing of the manual for business success; training of the business coaches; teaching of the curriculum; and monitoring of small business activities by the first cohort of girls after they completed the GS program.
2024: $40,000 to fund teaching of business and leadership skills to a second cohort of girls and supporting their micro-business start-ups; and training the first cohort of girls to run Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) to provide on-going funding for their businesses.
2025: $30,000 to fund the first cohort’s ongoing life skills training; the second cohort’s establishment of Village Savings and Loans Associations; and the establishment of the financial literacy and business success program for a third cohort, in a new community of refugees.