Engaging Girls Changing Communities

Engaging Girls, Changing Communities: Examining Girls’ Processes of Civic Engagement and Leadership (EGCC) investigates how young women and girls engage in leadership and civic activities in new urban environments.

The project brings together researchers and community members along with the young women to define leadership, on their own terms.

EGCC invites girls to re-define and explore different ways to participate in their communities. EGCC is designed to create insight into the complexities of nurturing youth girl leadership and will ensure the knowledge reaches local school boards and to effect policy change at the Ministry level.

The project will recruit, hire and train youth girls to act as peer interviewers and be involved in providing insight about themselves as girls, mobilize this knowledge, and communicate broadly about the project activities and our findings. In this way, EGCC utilizes and builds upon youth capacity to take a critical role in examining issues of community engagement and leadership.

EGCC aims to inform civic stakeholders how to fully and sustainably engage girls’ relatively untapped potential to enhance civic life. By identifying barriers and enhancers to civic participation and leadership, EGCC will contribute to building sustainable community partnerships and activities, which take into account the dynamics of the new urban environment and promote the development of girls as future leaders.

Ama M. Kwakyewah, one of the youth interviewers for the EGCC project, wrote the poem “City life, Life Style” in 2012. It is a piece on Kwakyewah’s relationship with the urban environment. You can read it here.