Girls' Empowerment and Management (GEM) Project - Phase II

Name: Girls' Empowerment and Management (GEM) Project - Phase II
Duration: February 2009 - April 2011
Donors: Nike Foundation

This project, GEM Phase II, has reshaped intervention to address extending tutorial support into higher secondary grades, greater emphasis on building economic capabilities and assets, cascading life skills to a greater number of girls, and extending strengthening of girl enablers. GEM II has added an additional core component on testing, documenting and disseminating learning on the GEM model and its relationship to the "Girl Effect." GEM II will serve with 481 girls as core beneficiaries, with a host of other students, stakeholders, and micro-and macro-level girl enablers being reached through the project. As in GEM I, GEM II will operate in 15 sites in Gambella, Amhara, and the Southern Nations and Nationalities' Region.

The overall goal of GEM Phase II is to empower girls by equipping them with the necessary economic, academic and life skills to become leaders and decision-makers. Pact expects that by the end of the project, girls will have become leaders and role models in their communities, as well as become decision-makers in their own lives, academically, economically and in life choices.

Pact also expects that the Nike Foundation's theory of change regarding the Girl Effect will have rippled in GEM Phase II target communities and beyond, and that the communities contribute to the academic and economic development of girls as well as observing a benefit to their contribution/support of girls. The theory of change underlying these expected results purports that, when a girl gains economic, academic, and life skills, she gains increased autonomy over choices in her life. The next step in this theory of change contends that girls then gain access to new opportunities, such as to marry and bear children later and to engage in income generating activities and employment. In sum, these choices and opportunities improve her life situation and have a ripple effect beyond her own life, to those around her. GEM Phase II seeks to implement, document, and demonstrate this process in practical, measurable terms.

GEM Phase II will undertake activities in the following core areas:

• Enhancing Girls' Academic Attainment 
•  Building Girls' Economic Capabilities and Assets
• Sustaining and Cascading Life Skills and Growing Leaders
• Building the Capacity of Girl Enablers to Support Girls
• Testing and Learning from the GEM Model and its relationship to the Girl Effect.
  

Staff contacts

	Leslie Mitchell Country Representative Addis Ababa, Ethiopia leslie@pactet.org
	Emmanuel Lamptey Program Officer Nairobi, Kenya elamptey@pactworld.org