A Girl’s Life Isn’t a Silo: Rethinking How We Invest in Africa’s Girls
A girl does not experience her life as a collection of sectors.
Her ability to stay in school may depend on her health. Her health may depend on whether she feels safe. Her economic opportunities may be shaped by whether she marries or has children early. Her mental wellbeing, relationships, education, safety, and ability to make decisions about her own future are deeply interconnected.
Yet development programs and funding are often organized very differently.
Health sits here. Education there. Protection somewhere else. Economic empowerment has another strategy, another budget, another set of outcomes.
What would change if we designed around the reality of a girl’s life instead?
This session, hosted by Lwala Community Alliance and Tiko, will explore integrated, girl-centered approaches that bring together health, education, protection, mental wellbeing, and economic opportunity. It will look at what becomes possible when girls’ voices, choices, and leadership shape programs, and when organizations collaborate across the institutional boundaries that too often define development work.
The conversation will draw on evidence, practice, and innovation from across sub-Saharan Africa, asking what we already know about approaches that support girls across multiple dimensions of their lives and where significant gaps remain.
It will also examine the implications for investment. Integrated programming can sound compelling in principle, but funders, governments, and implementing organizations are still frequently structured around individual sectors and outcomes. What needs to change in how programs are financed, measured, coordinated, and governed if we want to respond to girls’ lives as they actually experience them?
What to expect
An interactive working session grounded in practical experience and evidence.
Perspectives from people working directly with girls and across health, education, research, policy, and related fields will provide a starting point. Participants will then move into smaller groups to examine what integrated, girl-centered approaches require in practice.
The conversation will look beyond calls for greater coordination to the harder implementation questions: who needs to work together, what gets in the way, how girls themselves participate in decisions, how success should be measured across sectors, and what funders and governments need to do differently.
Groups will bring their insights back into the room, creating a set of shared takeaways about what it would take to move from fragmented interventions toward more coherent support for girls.
Who this is for
This session is for funders, governments, practitioners, researchers, advocates, locally led organizations, and others working across adolescent health, education, gender equality, protection, mental wellbeing, economic empowerment, and youth development who want to rethink how programs and investments respond to the whole of a girl’s life.
What you will get out of it
- Evidence and practical lessons from integrated approaches supporting girls in sub-Saharan Africa
- A clearer understanding of where siloed programs and funding can fall short
- Ideas for connecting health, education, protection, wellbeing, and economic opportunity more effectively
- Practical discussion about what governments, funders, and implementing organizations need to do differently
- Shared takeaways for designing investments around girls’ lived realities rather than institutional silos
Hosted by
- Lwala Community Alliance
- Tiko
- Guttmacher Institute
- SHOFCO