Girls First Fund and Grantee Partners Set to Attend Women Deliver Conference 2023

July 13, 2023

The Girls First Fund (GFF) is supporting a 14-member delegation of team members and grantee partners to attend the Women Deliver Conference 2023, in Kigali, Rwanda from 17 to 20 July 2023.

The Women Deliver Conference is one of the largest multi-sectoral convenings to advance gender equality. It is co-created by grassroots advocates, multilateral governments, the private sector, philanthropies, and youth.

Led by the GFF Director Fanta Touré-Puri, this is our biggest delegation to an international convening so far. The delegation includes representatives from our grantee partners Les Ailes du Cœur (Democratic Republic of Congo); CONAMUCA and Caminante Proyecto Educativo (Dominican Republic); Cellule Nigérienne des Jeunes Filles Leader (Niger); and Girls To Lead Africa (Uganda).

During the conference, GFF and our grantee partners will leverage opportunities to share our approach, learnings and results in communities where our partners are leading work to end child marriage. Our exciting events lineup offers spaces for connection, conversation and collaboration with a broad range of partners, including community-based organizations and other partners in the ecosystem.

Our Lineup of Events

We are proud co-hosts of the Population Council-led Girls Deliver Pre-Conference on Adolescent Girls, where some members of our delegation will be speaking on roundtables focusing on education and building girls’ political power. The pre-conference, which takes place on 16th July, will provide a dedicated space for multi-sectorial conversations rooted in evidence, especially from adolescents themselves and stakeholders from lower- and middle-income countries.

In partnership with the American Jewish World Service (AJWS) and WomenStrong International, we are hosting a concurrent session on 19th July at the Kigali Convention Centre. Young feminist leaders from the Global South will speak about their experiences, priorities and challenges and what success looks like for them. We will also discuss feminist, trust-based funding practices and how funders should adapt their approaches to better support grantee-led social change efforts.

Together with development Research and Projects Center (dRPC) from Nigeria, we will also host a session on the different approaches in education being used to support efforts to end child marriage in countries where the practice still exists, with a particular focus on experiences from Nigeria and Uganda. This session at the Echidna Education Hub in the Conference Exhibition Space will feature insights from panelists on their work in high level policy advocacy as well as grassroots interventions led by community-based organizations.

Along with our founder HRH Mabel van Oranje, we will convene a partners’ meetup bringing together our grantee partners, Advisory Board members, adolescent girl leaders, donors, and collaborators. The meetup will create space to celebrate and hear from four of the adolescent girls from our Changemakers Council, who co-led the design of our new global grants for partners outside our primary focus countries.

GFF team and grantee partners will also speak on panels organized by other partners. These include a Purposeful side event on Resourcing Resistance and Challenging the Supremacy of International Development Programming, and a Chroma Collective side event on Cultivating Donor Support for Gender Equality.

We are excited to support our grantee partners to fully participate in this global space, as we remain committed to accompanying them in their journeys and facilitate access to platforms where they can share the important work they are leading in their communities.

We look forward to meeting our community and making new connections at Women Deliver! Check out the details on our events below, and join us as we lift up important voices in our collective efforts to end child marriage and support girls to build the futures they want.