Girl Nation Rocks!

Ever thought of a world where women are empowered to tell compelling stories that inspire change in their communities? That is the world we are trying to build through our Girl Nation Project; a social impact film project that targets 150 female undergraduates with technical filmmaking skills so they can create films and other media projects that highlight girls and women’s issues and mobilize community action towards the empowerment of girls and women. The Girl Nation project is proudly funded by the Embassy of France to Nigeria through its Innovative Projects from Civil Societies and Coalitions of Actors (Projets Innovants des Societes Civiles et des Coalitions d’Acteurs – PISCCA) Fund.

The Girl Nation project is piloting in University of Abuja and the Bayero University in Kano and seeks to produce 150 young women who have received training and start to build their skills in filmmaking for social impact. The pilot cohort are expected to produce a documentary and short film profiling a girls’ and women’s issue in society.

As part of the activities in the project, we had a networking event where the ladies interfaced with representatives of civil society organisations actively working on girls and women’s issues in the respective cities. Next, we hosted an empowerment workshop that provided the young women with personal agency – a very relevant personal empowerment journey where the women learned the empowerment model and framework designed by the Empowerment Institute, USA. This is intended to give the women the tools that they need to create the life that they really want for themselves and be better empowered to inspire change in their communities. Next, the women went through an intensive 2-weeks filmmaking training where they learned the basics of filmmaking from pre-production, through production, to the post-production stages of filmmaking. Right after their training, they will be working on their practical projects producing a documentary and a short film each.

In the course of the training workshops, we had a World Pulse outreach where we introduced the young women to the World Pulse community and the abundant opportunities available to them when they connect to other women leaders around the world and amplify their stories on the World Pulse platform. Already, Girls Voices Initiative enjoys very rich promotion of its work on the World Pulse platform and now, these empowered storytellers get to enjoy equal value and support from a vibrant community of women leaders from around the world. Shout out to some of the ladies that I can track among the ladies already logged on to World Pulse from this project; Pimkie, Rafat, and Miracle.

As the project comes close to completion, the young women are busy producing their documentaries and short films and have an exciting activity ahead where they get to screen their films in select communities and measure the impact of their films in their communities. It also provides an opportunity for them to receive feedback from the communities to inspire them to produce more compelling films in the future.

Watch out for those remarkable films! We will be sure to share the films with the phenomenal World Pulse community, so you get a chance to also give us some productive feedback to help us produce better films in the future. Visit our website and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to keep up with highlights from our Girl Nation Project. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel so you can be among the first to see our social impact films once they are live!