Women and Girls Lead – Bangladesh set out to raise awareness of human rights and gender issues among Bangladeshi youth. Their main objectives: reducing gender-based violence and promoting gender equality.

In August 2015, Women and Girls Lead Kenya launched the Women in the Red Leadership Awards, putting out a call for nominations to partners in 27 counties across the country. elected from over 70 nominations, the finalists varied from 14-year-old peer educator and reproductive health advocate Serah Mwakali Mulwa, to 53-year-old Beatrice Kimani, a peace mobilizer and advocate in Burnt Forest, risking her life to take a stand against ethnic conflict.

On October 11th 2015 in Gangni, Meherpur, two thousands students, parents and teachers took an oath against child marriage and to support girls education on the occasion of International Day of the Girl.

On October 8, 2015, WGLG Kenya will bring together the countries most influential women leaders in media and technology through a live stream event with OVEE.

Activist, advocate, leader and United Nations youth advisor – this is Vivian Onano.

On September 9th, Women and Girls Lead Global and our partners ITVS, Ford Foundation, USAID and CARE hosted a Global Gender Gap Challenge at the gorgeous GitHub headquarters. The goal of the event was to create new design and ideas that will transform the lives of women and girls.

In Pucallpa, Peru, youth filmmakers are recognized for their extraordinary work on their film “Don’t Back Down”, which focuses on reproductive health and its effects on youth education, similar issues that are focused on in WGLG’s campaign in Peru, “Ahora es Cuando”. Not only was the film successful in giving a voice to countless young people across Peru in their struggle to transition to adulthood, it has continued to build momentum since its red carpet premiere.

Campaigning among friends and colleagues on Facebook, Margaret Tawa has won the Listener’s Choice Award hosted on WGL-Kenya’s “Women in the Red” radio show. Founder of an organization for orphans and vulnerable children, head of two community schools, and planning to run for County Assembly in 2017, Margaret can’t be stopped!

Thousands of young girls wrote passionate letters declaring their right to stay in school and out of child marriage to commemorate National Girl Child Day in Bangladesh this year. The Youth Summit and Letter Festival – organized by Women and Girls Lead Global, National Girl Child Advocacy Forum and Youth Ending Hunger-Naogaon – called on girls to write open letters to their parents, telling them why they didn’t want to marry young. Over 3,000 girls from 53 different schools in Bangladesh participated, sharing their desire for freedom and their disappointment that the law banning child marriage for girls under 16 is not being consistently upheld.

Bhagwat Thorat pulled each of his three daughters out of school when they reached puberty, fearful that if he waited too long to find them husbands they would have fewer prospects, that they would become victims to sexual violence, or if nothing else, that his investment in their education would end up benefitting the husband’s family and not his own.