Why We’re Raising Funds

Girl Up, a United Nations Foundation campaign, is raising funds to ignite the empowerment of girls, by girls around the world.

What does that mean?

Girls have limitless potential. When they are empowered, it benefits us all. Data shows that investing in girls is KEY to reducing poverty around the world:

• When women are educated and can earn and control income, infant mortality declines, child health and nutrition improve, agricultural productivity rises, population growth slows, economies expand and cycles of poverty are broken
  
  

• When 10% more girls finish school, a country’s GDP is increased by 3%
  
  

• Women reinvest nearly 90% of their income back into their families and communities, while men only reinvest around 40%
  
  Yet in many countries around the world, girls continue to lack opportunities.

Girl Up, a campaign of the United Nations Foundation, is a movement that empowers girls to stand up, speak up and rise up for some of the hardest-to-reach girls around the world. Through Girl Up’s leadership and empowerment program, girls learn to advocate, raise money and use their voices to support their peers whose voices are often not heard.

We need your help and together, we will make a difference.

Our Goal

• Our goal is to raise $1,000,000 to help girls empower each other and transform our world.
  

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Why Join our Fight for Girls?

Girl Up is a powerful movement with a two-part approach:

1. CREATE GIRL LEADERS through skill building, education, and advocacy and leadership training. Girl Up has registered more than 1,000 Girl Up Clubs in middle schools, high schools and college campuses around the world, creating a powerful network of influential girl leaders. We have also trained more than 100 Teen Advisors, putting them in the public spotlight as key representatives of our campaign.
   
   

2. EMPOWER SOME OF THE WORLD’S HARDEST-TO-REACH GIRLS through our unique partnership with the United Nations’ adolescent girl programs. Girl Up supports UN programs for adolescent girls in Ethiopia, Malawi, Liberia, Guatemala and India, working to ensure that these girls are educated, safe, healthy, counted and positioned to be leaders in their communities.
   
   

What does all of this mean? Girl Up is impacting hundreds of thousands of girls around the world.

Where Your Dollars Are Going

• ALL funds raised through this campaign will support Girl Up programs that empower girls everywhere.
  

Our Impact:

Since Girl Up launched in 2010 we have raised $5.6 million for UN programs that help girls in developing countries, grown to more 1,000 clubs across the world, and had more than 82 Teen Advisors trained as leaders of the campaign. Some of the girls whose lives we have changed include:

CHRISTINE // MALAWI:Christine has faced many challenges in Malawi, but her drive to complete her education has helped her through it all.

Christine lives in a community where tradition says that education is only for males. She didn’t want to get married at age 12 or 14 like many other girls in her community were forced to do. Instead, she dreamed of going to secondary school, and maybe even going to college. But education in Malawi is not free, and no one – not her parents, relatives or friends – supported her.

When Christine refused to marry a boy in her community, he locked her in his home against her will for one week. Her parents and the rest of the community sided with him. Their marriage would increase her family’s worth and the community thought that, even as a young girl, she was ready for marriage. No one ever asked Christine.

That’s when a Girl Up supported program entered the picture. The organization funded Christine’s secondary education so she didn’t have to get married. Christine has since received her diploma and is continuing her education. Christine is proof that when you give a girl a chance to receive an education, she can take on the world.

HOSA // ETHIOPIA: A few years ago, a 14 year-old Hosa arrived in Ethiopia with her mother, two sisters, and her brother and his four children. They left behind a life in Mogadishu, Somalia that was filled with tragedy. Her father died in Somalia and her younger sister was killed there. No one knew what exactly happened to her brother’s wife.

Hosa does not remember how they got to Ethiopia, but she does recall her schooling in Somalia, which she attended until seventh grade. There she learned that education is the portal to a new life. “If there is no education, there is no life,” Hosa said. She is now in school at a refugee camp in Ethiopia supported by Girl Up, where her family has come to find peace and freedom.

Hosa hopes to one day become a lawyer. And if Somalia finds peace, she plans to return to help rebuild and find justice. In the meantime, Hosa wakes up every morning at 6:00 am at the refugee camp to help make breakfast and do chores. At 7:00 a.m. she begins the long trek to school. It’s a long walk, but she knows it’s worth the distance.

ROCIO // GIRL UP TEEN ADVISOR: Rocio Ortega is a former Teen Advisor (2011-2012), founder of one of the first pilot Girl Up clubs and Youth Champion for Girl Up. “I started a Girl Up Club in my high school to raise awareness and funds for girls in Malawi, Ethiopia and Guatemala,” she explains. “It was shocking to me, but people in my Latino community had never thought about the need to educate and help women in developing countries. Through Girl Up, we introduced the words, ‘female empowerment’ and ‘feminism’ to my community and people began to get on board.”

Through Girl Up’s leadership platform, Rocio’s possibilities have been endless.As a club leader in California she worked for passage of child marriage legislation. She also interned for U.S. Congresswoman Grace Napolitano and served as a U.S. House of Representatives Page. Rocio’s incredible contributions have been recognized on a national scale; she was awarded the 2014 Nickelodeon HALO Award, and is a Coca-Cola Scholar. Now, as a student at Wellesley College, she serves Girl Up as a Youth Champion, educating people on campus and in the wider community about girls and women’s issues in developing countries.

And if all that weren’t enough, Rocio was chosen to introduce First Lady Michelle Obama during Girl Up’s Leadership Summit in 2015!

About Girl Up

Girls are powerful. When they’re educated, healthy, safe, and counted, they transform their communities. Girl Up, the United Nations Foundation’s adolescent girl campaign, engages girls to stand up for girls, empowering each other and changing our world. Led by a community of passionate advocates raising awareness and funds, Girl Up helps the hardest to reach girls living in places where it is hardest to be a girl.

What began as a campaign for American girls, Girl Up has quickly become a borderless movement, with nearly half a million supporters and advocates from the U.S. and around the world. Girl Up’s unique leadership training and skill development has created a generation of current and future girl leaders; leaders who have helped Girl Up raise millions of dollars for United Nations programs, lobbied members of Congress to stop child marriage and ensure that girls are registered at birth, and have showed their schools, friends and communities the true power of girls. Learn more at www.girlup.org

By donating at least $25 you are helping transform girls into young leaders who will change the world. Each contribution will make a significant impact. Thank you for your generous contributions to this important cause!

The UN Foundation is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization (EIN/tax ID number: 58-2368165). Your donations are fully tax-deductible to the extent allowable by law.