In our African cultures, we often find that people expect there to be one path only, the good path, the path to success. Succeeding and pleasing our parents is often seen as motivation enough for young women. And yet we know this isn’t true, especially for the young generation, who have their own goals and […]
Category Archives: All Articles
One of the greatest challenges that we have seen is that many mentoring projects or programmes are unstructured. Whilst this may work in traditional forms of mentoring – let’s say when an aunty takes a girl under her wing and gives her advice when she needs it (and often whether she wants it or not!). […]
Mentoring is always best in person, but you may have to do it online sometimes. We have heard from amazing women mentoring girls in remote towns or students who have been sent to remote places as part of their studies or work experience. The mentoring has helped them to negotiate these challenging environments. We also […]
As a mentor, it is important to understand the education system your girls or young women are experiencing to give the best advice to your mentee about their academic performance. Each of our African countries has different education systems, and it’s important that we are aware of our own. Sometimes we find that the system […]
In Africa we are conscious of academic qualifications as routes into work, but did you know that many employers are more interested in soft skills? Soft skills refer to how you work or behave; they are personal attributes needed for job success, including time management, listening skills, networking, teamwork, creative thinking, and conflict resolution. Soft […]
I was just amazed that an adult would want to spend time talking with me about my dreams. No adult has ever really had time for me. Mentee, Nigeria This section provides you with resources so that you can help your mentee to set goals. We would expect this to take several weeks: there is […]
In some of our many African cultures, confidence can be confused with boldness. It can be seen as disrespect or poor manners. This is not confidence. Confidence is something we hold within ourselves. It means we value ourselves, our talents and our potential. It means we believe that we can make a difference through our […]
Confidence is about believing that you are valuable, worthwhile, and capable and we thought about this in our African contexts in the previous section. This can empower young women to act courageously and face challenges head-on. While there are some aspects of confidence that young women don’t have any control over, a huge part of […]
In our African cultures, we can be too scared of failure to start. We worry about wasting money. We worry about what others will think or say behind our backs. It takes confidence to take a risk. Can we become confident enough to fail? Michael Jordan is one of the most famous and successful basketball […]
“It’s easy to see in hindsight” is a phrase we may be familiar with. We can look back at things that have happened and realise that we made a mistake, or tell ourselves that we would have done it differently with the knowledge we have now. This can be in response to fixing something that […]