“When I was 12, my dad tried to marry me off,” Yvonne says. “I refused and he chased me away from home. I ran away to my aunt. My uncle was circumcising his daughters and decided I would be included."

In Kenya, once a girl is circumcised, she is immediately given away in marriage and often doesn’t go to school. Of the 880 million illiterate adults worldwide, the majority are women from sub-Saharan Africa. In many of these countries, only one in four girls receives a secondary education.

Yvonne, however, was among the lucky ones. After escaping from her uncle’s home, she found her way to a program for rescued girls run by the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE), a pan-African organization launched in 1992 with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation. Today, Yvonne says, “I would like to become a lawyer.”

Underscoring the Foundation’s long-standing commitment to fortifying education across the continent, FAWE has touched the lives of some 12 million African girls.

As many studies have shown, the empowerment of women through education brings enormous benefits not only to individual girls and women, but to communities, countries, and regions—and, therefore, to boys and men as well. As educated girls become educated women, with the knowledge and skills to influence the direction and governance of their societies, livelihoods improve, families become healthier, and civil liberties expand. 

“We are not helpless as a group,” FAWE founding member Fay Chung noted at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center meeting that sparked the creation of the organization. “We need to have a vision of where we want to go, realizing that each day, there is something positive we can do.”

What FAWE does each day is to mobilize female government ministers, university heads, and senior policy makers at the national level, along with human rights activists, to design and model educational policy that promotes gender equity. 

The organization is also involved in the training and mentoring of university-level women to help them successfully complete their undergraduate studies and prepare for leadership roles in higher education—so that women like Yvonne will no longer be the exception.