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FP/RH Champion Spotlight: Strong Enough Girls’ Empowerment Initiative (SEGEI)


Knowledge SUCCESS loves feedback from our readers. We want to hear how our resources benefit your work, how we can improve, and your ideas for the site. Recently, you’ve mentioned wanting more insights specific to your countries and the context you work in. Say no more! We’ll be featuring organizations working at the national level in a series called “FP/RH Champion Spotlight.” Our goal is to spark new partnerships and give well-deserved credit to those advancing family planning and reproductive health with a regional focus.

This week, our featured organization is Strong Enough Girls’ Empowerment Initiative (SEGEI).

FP/RH Champion Spotlight banner with blue highlights behind the words FP/RH Champion Spotlight. Spotlight graphics are in the four corners of the rectangular graphic.

Organization

Strong Enough Girls’ Empowerment Initiative (SEGEI)

Location

Nigeria

The Work

SEGEI (pronounced “SEG-Eye”) empowers adolescents and young women through education, mentorship, and comprehensive sexuality education. Its three main goals are to ignite—help its beneficiaries find and use their voices and talents to become their own advocates, nurture—SEGEI helps beneficiaries with academic, health, and professional attainment, and harness—tap into the talents of beneficiaries to promote community empowerment.

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SEGEI runs a monthly outreach and publishes health- and education-focused blog posts to highlight the value of girls’ education and spread knowledge about puberty and reproductive health. As an empowerment organization, it focuses on giving young people and women the information needed to make their own choices about their health and advance gender equality.  

In one project called “Girl Advocates for Gender Equality,” SEGEI partners with an NGO to train 36 adolescent girls across Nigeria via bi-weekly WhatsApp mentorship sessions on topics including: 

  • Sexual- and gender-based violence.
  • Girls’ education and financial literacy.
  • Women in leadership.
  • Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

The girls use their phones (purchased by the project) to capture pictures and videos of outreach to other girls outside of the program, creating a cascade of learning in their communities.

SEGEI is a recent winner of The Pitch. The associated small grant enables it to produce a 20-episode podcast series that leverages creative oral storytelling to document and share real-life experiences of grassroots FP leaders in Nigeria and the Republic of Niger. It facilitates knowledge exchange and highlighting what works and what doesn’t work in reproductive health programming. They are aiming to change the narrative on how we define, understand, and use knowledge by highlighting indigenous young leaders who are shifting norms and driving change in their communities. By doing this, SEGEI hopes to address the “knowledge to action” gap, strengthen the use of information for FP programs, and prevent wasting of resources.

Want More from SEGEI?

Check back soon for a new FP/RH Champion Spotlight organization!

Tykia Murray

Former Managing Editor of Digital Content, Knowledge SUCCESS

Tykia Murray is a former Managing Editor of Digital Content for Knowledge SUCCESS, a five-year global project led by a consortium of partners and funded by USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health to support learning and create opportunities for collaboration and knowledge exchange within the family planning and reproductive health community. Tykia holds a BA in Writing from Loyola University Maryland and an MFA from the University of Baltimore's Creative Writing & Publishing Arts program.