About the Together Women Rise Grants Program
The Together Women Rise Grants Program has two key components that support our overall mission to achieve global gender equality. Featured Grants are largely focused on delivering direct services by funding grassroots organizations that empower and support women and girls in low-income and marginalized communities in the Global South. Our Transformation Partnerships are designed to invest in areas where we can make the biggest impact on achieving global gender equality by addressing the root causes of gender inequality.
Through our Featured Grants Program, we highlight a different organization/project each month, providing a variety of learning materials on the issue and how the grant will be used. Through the Featured Grants program, we support capacity building, new programs, or expansion of existing programs. The following is information on the grant we are featuring for October 2025.
The Global Issue
Removing Barriers to Reentering Formal Education
Around the world, an estimated 129 million girls are not in school—a crisis fueled by poverty, gender norms, conflict, and systemic infrastructure gaps. The vast majority—97 million—are of secondary school age, making adolescence a particularly vulnerable stage for girls. Globally, twice as many girls as boys will never start formal education, and among those who do, returning to school after leaving is a formidable challenge. Just 49% of countries have reached gender parity in primary education, and this drops to 42% in lower secondary and 24% in upper secondary.
Common barriers include child marriage, gender-based violence, economic pressures, and family preferences to educate boys. Additionally, many schools lack adequate safety, hygiene, and sanitation to meet girls’ needs—issues that lead to absenteeism and dropouts. Among the world’s poorest households, one-third of adolescent girls have never attended school.
These inequities come with steep economic costs: the World Bank estimates that lost lifetime productivity and earnings due to limited girls’ education amount to $15 trillion to $30 trillion globally. Beyond economics, education equips girls to make informed decisions, delay marriage, and shape their futures with agency and confidence.
While this challenge is global, the data from Kenya illustrates a particular need, and urgency, but also the potential for impactful progress.
About Our Grantee
Together Women Rise is funding a $50,000 Featured Grant to For the Good to support the project Expanding Access to Education for Girls in Rural Kenya: Naikarra Expansion. This is a high-need area and with a high project impact. It will serve 3,000 girls directly, with an additional indirect impact of 5,000 women and girls.
For the Good partners with communities to support girls’ access to education so they are equipped and emboldened to take charge of their own lives. The organization currently works in two remote, high-need regions of southern Kenya: Loita Hills in Narok County and Naikarra County. These areas have been labeled as “not wanting education,” but For the Good’s experience indicates that the opposite is true: residents want education but lack opportunities for it. Launched 10 years ago, For the Good increases gender equity and access to education in these regions by reducing the primary, local barriers that prevent girls from enrolling in and staying in school. Core programs leverage community knowledge and the leadership of local young women to enroll and keep children in school through secondary education, an approach that ensures the work is low-cost, scalable, and sustainable.
When girls who have long faced systemic and historical barriers gain access to education, they not only strengthen their own voice and choices—they unlock greater possibilities for their families, communities, and the world. Education fuels personal agency and lays the foundation for a more just and sustainable future for everyone. For the Good firmly believes that the girls, mothers, teachers, activists, and leaders in the communities they work with have the keenest insights into the challenges they face and significant capacities to solve them. They often just need a little additional outside support, knowledge, or encouragement. That is why they consider them their primary partners in making change for girls a reality.
Life Challenges of the Women & Girls Served
The Maasai women and girls in Kenya’s Narok and Naikarra Counties live in a remote location and face extreme poverty. There is little infrastructure of any kind: few families have access to electricity, water, sanitation, or transportation and must therefore spend hours daily walking to gather water and firewood. The bulk of this work falls on girls, increasing the likelihood that parents will keep them home from school or keep them from reentering school to help sustain the family. Other significant barriers exist that prevent girls from enrolling and staying in school, including a patriarchal culture that encourages female genital cutting/mutilation (FGC/M) and early marriage, a lack of school infrastructure, and high teen pregnancy rates. A mere 17.5% of girls in these regions have completed primary school, and only 10.8% have completed secondary school.
Due to the distances to local primary schools, many parents hold their children back from starting school until they are much older. Similarly, a lack of local secondary day schools requires many hours of daily walking, creating substantial risks for adolescent girls. Intensified rains and flooding caused by climate change are making this walk increasingly difficult for all children to navigate, as the Loita and Naikarra regions have few bridges and children cannot safely cross the many flooded rivers that span these regions.
How the Grant Will be Used
Together Women Rise will fund For the Good’s Expanding Access to Girls Education in Rural Kenya: Naikarra Expansion project, increasing access to education for girls in Naikarra County, where girls are underrepresented in the primary schools by over 90 percent.
To address barriers to formal schooling, For the Good trains teams of young, Maasai, female interns called Team Angaza. These women show interest and aptitude for leadership and are secondary school graduates. For the Good gives them the skills and tools necessary to become leaders, role models, and changemakers in their communities. The knowledge and skills they gain through their internships amplify their voices and strengthen their confidence as leaders, shifting traditional gendered perceptions of women’s roles and providing important new role models for local girls.
For The Good’s Team Angaza interns carry out the key activities in this project:
- Identifying out-of-school children. Team Angaza’s primary role is to enroll school-aged children into school.
- Meeting with the children’s parents tolisten to their challenges, help them understand and appreciate the value of education for their daughters, and enroll their children into Naikarra’s 18 registered public primary schools.To prepare for this, Team Angaza members receive reflective listening training, a three-day training on how to listen empathetically to parents and guide them to the decision to enroll their children. Recently, For the Good introduced participatory videos to help Team Angaza members show, not just tell, Maasai fathers how educating girls can result in positive changes for the entire family.
Providing Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SHRH) education and reusable sanitary pads to local girls and women. Team Angaza members receive a deep dive training into the anatomy and physiology of the female reproductive system in a Training of Trainers (TOT) program designed by For the Good. Using participatory activities and educational tools and games, team members are taught different techniques to break through the barriers of this sensitive issue. This year, For the Good aims to provide reusable pad kits, period-tracking bracelets, and SHRH education to 3,000 girls across Loita and Naikarra. These efforts have received very positive feedback from students and teachers.- Helping to identify and address hyperlocal needs across Naikarra’s remote villages. In an effort to develop community leaders and help Team Angaza members grow professionally, For the Good provides monthly seminars to support personal and professional development. Topics include financial management, stress management, balancing family and work, career choice, relationships at home and work, communication skills, handling delicate situations in the community (rape, abuse), and photography.
- Helping to galvanize local mothers and stakeholders to become champions for their daughter’s education and to creatively solve other issues that affect local girls.
To address the lack of school infrastructure, For the Good partners with local communities to build affordable secondary day schools in regions where none exist. To date, For the Good has started four new day schools in the Loita Hills and hopes to build a fifth school there, plus two additional schools in Naikarra. These secondary day schools are critical to creating access to secondary education for girls because:
- They are significantly cheaper than secondary boarding schools, which makes them accessible to poor families.
- Families often prioritize education for their boys and can’t or won’t pay additional boarding school fees for girls.
- Day schools allow teen mothers to stay in school, which is critical as Narok County has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Kenya. This high teen pregnancy rate is a significant contributor to girls’ school dropout rates and a key motivation behind For the Good’s recent efforts to increase the reproductive health and rights education work done by their Team Angaza. For the Good staff also visit with teachers and families to encourage them to support girls returning to school after giving birth.
Based on For the Good’s prior experience, this project is expected to have a positive effect on education and literacy, gender equality, reproductive health and family planning, education and literacy mentoring, and reducing early child marriage.
Specifically, For the Good anticipates the following positive benefits and outcomes:
- Direct impact for 3,000 girls; indirect impact for 5,000
- 72% of children enrolled by Team Angaza remain in school if they persist past the three-month mark
- 30% reduction in pregnancy rates across primary and local secondary schools in the region by 2027
- 75%, or 1,837 of estimated 2,450 out-of-school children ages 5-13 enrolled in school across Naikarra by 2027 and tracked through 8th This includes enrollment of an estimated 1,300 out-of-school girls.
- The mobilization of mothers as changemakers leading the way to solve a variety of local challenges.
Together Women Rise’s funding supports transportation costs for Team Angaza members to travel to remote homesteads – the single greatest expense of this project – as well as education stipends for team members and significant training opportunities for all team members to expand their professional skills and develop their confidence and voice as leaders in their communities. Interns are also offered the opportunity to propose, design, and implement small community development projects of their choice in their respective communities.
The primary metrics For the Good uses to evaluate the success of programs are local primary and secondary school enrollments, the number of new day secondary classrooms built, the number of pregnancies in primary and local secondary schools, and the number of women and girls who have received reproductive health education and reusable sanitary pads. Because retention is critical to a true understanding of the impact of For the Good’s primary school enrollment work, the organization continues to track children once they are enrolled into school and has also followed up with independent audits to determine retention at three and six months out. These numbers are reviewed quarterly by Team Angaza coordinators in each region and For the Good’s Executive Director to assess which regions may need additional resources and which Team Angaza may need additional training and/or support.
IMPACT – Direct: 3,000 women and girls; Indirect: 5,000 women and girls
Budget
Why We Love This Project/Organization
Alignment with the Mission of Together Women Rise: For the Good’s mission of partnering with local communities to effect change in remote areas reflects Together Women Rise’s commitment to ensure that girls have the same opportunities to thrive regardless of where they live.
We love that For the Good envisions a world where every girl can go to school. Interns are female secondary school graduates from the local Maasai communities. The girls impacted by this project need this support because their remote locations make other opportunities limited or nonexistent. This direct contact approach has the potential for far-reaching effects for generations to come.
Impact Story
Meet Soyian
When Soyian turned 11-years-old, her grandmother started showing up at her fourth-grade classroom twice a week to take her out of school because she felt it was time for Soyian to get married. Soyian’s stepmother, Nancy, would return her to school the next day.
For centuries, the most reliable path to security for Maasai women was marriage to an older, established man who could provide protection, resources, and status within the community. In the grandmother’s worldview, shaped by generations of Maasai tradition, it was time to arrange Soyian’s “cutting” (female genital mutilation/cutting) and marriage because it was the best way to secure her future. Soyian is the grandmother’s favorite grandchild, and that is precisely why she was so determined to arrange her marriage at such a young age. She wasn’t acting out of malice – she was acting out of love.
Competing ideas about the best ways to secure daughters’ futures are common in the rural, remote regions of Kenya where For the Good works. Climate-exacerbated drought and floods increase the pressures families feel to have their daughters marry young. Families who lose livestock to devastating weather events can feel desperate for the income that comes with a daughter’s bride price. High rates of teenage pregnancy also add pressure. Older boys and men commonly buy necessities for girls in this region so they can leverage those gifts to pressure girls for sex. Once an unmarried girl is pregnant, parents feel pressure to find her a husband. And girls almost always drop out of school once they are married. Without that education, they are unable to secure their own livelihoods and are much more likely to perpetuate the cycle of poverty for their own children.
Nancy’s efforts to keep Soyian in school received a powerful boost early in 2023 when For the Good’s staff began meeting with Soyian’s grandmother and father to understand their challenges and gain their commitment to stop taking her out of school. The organization had recently expanded into Naikarra, the county where they live, and a For the Good supervisor, Christine Mpoe, was crisscrossing the remote region to intervene in situations like Soyian’s. At the time, Nancy was living in a small 10 x 15-foot lean-to shelter provided by a local church with Soyian and her own three children. Christine met regularly with her to encourage her to keep fighting for Soyian’s education. Later that year, For the Good added volunteer members to Team Angaza – all young Maasai women local to the communities where they work –– to assist Christine in this work and reach hundreds more out-ot-school children. The lived experience of the staff and volunteers means they understand the hopes and fears that guide families’ decisions for their daughters. This allows them to listen nonjudgmentally to parents and grandparents and engage in conversations that change their hearts and minds about the value of enrolling and keeping their daughters in school.
Nancy continues to struggle but remains determined to find a way to keep Soyian and all her own children in school. The expanding roles of Team Angaza mean that Soyian will receive menstrual pads and vital sexual and reproduction health education and other health information once she’s in sixth grade, decreasing her vulnerability to early pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections and increasing the likelihood she will stay in school.
In the meantime, Soyian shyly aspires to become a teacher and continues to grow stronger through each challenge she overcomes. Her grandmother, while still holding traditional values, has begun to see the possibility of security through education. This transformation in perspective represents the heart of For the Good’s work – not replacing cultural values but expanding them to embrace new possibilities for Maasai girls.
| For the Good helped me to maintain in school, thanks to Christine talking with my parents. I am confident now that I have that support and am hoping to continue having that helping hand.” – Soyian |
Learn More
Source Materials
Gender equality in education benefits every child
Silent suffering: Kenyan girls missing out on education
Ted Talk: Empower a girl, transform a community
Glossary
The Global South: The Global South includes the countries that experience higher levels of poverty, income inequality, lower life expectancy, and harsh living conditions compared to the wealthier nations in the “Global North” – located mostly in North America and Europe. The Global South primarily includes many of the countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific, and the Middle East.
FGC/M: Female Genital Cutting/Mutilation
SHRH: Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights education
