At 12, Anzoa Sarah was struggling with her body image and self-esteem. Today, at 24, she’s a powerful women’s rights lawyer in Kampala, Uganda’s capitol city. What changed? As an adolescent, she was introduced to the Mentoring and Empowerment Programme for Young Women (MEMPROW), a feminist organization working to empower women and girls across Uganda …
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Santoshi is the youngest of seven siblings in a family where none of her older sisters ever went to school and all were forced into marriage. As her sisters’ lives unfolded, Santoshi understood she couldn’t follow in their footsteps. She convinced her parents to allow her to go to school, but that was the extent …
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Losing shelter can be one of the most traumatic experiences of a person’s life. There’s no single cause behind this global crisis, but all people pushed into homelessness face the same question: Where do I go now? In India, a coalition of grassroots organizations from across the country, including four AJWS grantees, are answering this …
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Girls and young women across much of Latin America and the Caribbean face more challenges in everyday life than their male counterparts. Teenage pregnancy; sexual and gender-based violence; little choice in when, whether and whom to marry; lack of sex education; few options for good paying jobs; being forced to drop out of school and …
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Lucy Wanjiku Njenga always believed she was meant for something more than the life she was born into: “I saw myself getting from a place of poverty to success — I knew there was something else waiting for me.” Lucy was born and raised in Dandora, one of the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods of …
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Raising a voice for women amid the horrors of war
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