1: Kitenga Girls Secondary School
On 1,000 acres in a remote village in northern Tanzania, where life is hard and poverty is generational, a transformative project is underway: quality education and life skills for girls who need it most.
GEC’s very first partnership has been with the Immaculate Heart Sisters of Africa (IHSA), in Kitenga Village, Tanzania. While the Sisters had an ambitious vision to build the Kitenga Girls Secondary School (KGSS), they were unable to attract necessary attention and support from the global development community.
Recognizing an extreme need in the region and an opportunity to align with a local change-agent, GEC locked arms with the Sisters in 2012. This proved to be a critical and pivotal partnership for both, as together we built the school and opened doors five years later.
GEC was able to bring much-needed resources, planning expertise, and thought partnership to jointly carry out the Sisters’ vision and create an outstanding residential school for some of the world’s most deserving, but shut-out girls.
Today, GEC’s partnership with the IHSA Sisters continues to thrive. In 2023, enrollment at the school surpassed 200. It is a beautiful campus where girls are nurtured and educated so they can escape destructive cultural traditions and prepare for the futures they seek and deserve.
KGSS is a success story but also an unfinished one. As GEC expands its work, we will not step away from Kitenga but step into additional opportunities to support girl-centered initiatives.
🔗 Read more about the Kitenga Girls Secondary School and its impact on the students, local community, and beyond.
2: Ally Funder Alliance
In 2022, GEC developed a new philanthropic model, the Ally Funder Alliance (AFA). This deliberately small group of like-minded funders provides unrestricted funding and other non-financial assistance — what we call “Allyship” — to early-stage, promising, and locally-driven girl–centered organizations. Through collective action, the AFA will leverage the contributions of its members, while providing catalytic support to local organizations.
The AFA is a strategy to further accelerate impact by leveraging GEC’s own experience via a funder collaborative that gives proximal change-agents the capital, trust, and visibility they need to grow. There remain a few open slots for new funders to join the Alliance. Email us to learn more.
3: Garden for the Future
Garden for the Future is a permaculture partnership between Girls Education Collaborative and a girls’ school in Tanzania that is growing solutions to some of the most pressing problems the world faces today. Permaculture is a more sustainable approach to farming that encourages a holistic, ecologically-conscious lifestyle. Garden for the Future is a living lab that offers answers to questions about health and nutrition, of course, but also about climate change, gender equality, economic opportunity, and education.
In collaboration with Mainsprings and in partnership with the Kitenga Girls Secondary School, GEC has funded and is coordinating a pilot agriculture program to the intersection of educating girls and regenerative agriculture. Our tagline for the initiative is “Healthy People, Healthy Planet.”
