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6 amazing Canadians helping girls around the world

From a tech whiz to a human rights lawyer, these impressive ladies are working hard to improve the lives of girls and women globally.
6 amazing Canadians helping girls around the world

Photo, Reynold Li.

Awareness of the issues facing girls — poverty, lack of education, misogyny and violence — has grown fast and fiercely. So too have initiatives devoted to tackling these problems on a global scale, like Let Girls Learn, which aims to empower the 62 million girls who are not in school; or I Am That Girl, a global network devoted to turning "self-doubt" into self-love; or Plan Canada's equality initiative Because I am a Girl, repped by the likes of Sophie Trudeau. But there’s still work to be done. Here are five Canadian women who’ve taken on the challenge.

Amazing Canadians helping women

6 amazing Canadians helping girls around the worldPhoto, Reynold Li.

Danielle Thé

Founder of Devs without Borders, Toronto In 2015, 26-year-old Danielle Thé founded Devs without Borders, a non-profit that connects software engineers in the developed world with those in developing countries to find tech solutions for poverty and help those in need to access education and health care. Thé’s first project was an app for girls and women who’d been sexually assaulted in New Delhi, India. It worked in low-bandwidth regions and allowed users to chat anonymously, creating a community that broke through the post-assault shame. After it debuted, Thé heard from women around the globe who thought the app would be useful where they lived too. Last November, Devs without Borders hosted a two-day hackathon that paired engineers from Waterloo, Ont., with those in Bangladesh, to dream up innovations that would improve Bangladeshi women’s sexual and maternal health, as well as  the country’s infant mortality rate. “I firmly believe that technology can do so much more than it’s doing right now,” says Thé.

 

Danielle Thé Devs without BordersPhoto, Reynard Li.

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Chris Dendys

Director of External Relations, The Micronutrient Initiative, Ottawa The World Health Organization estimates that half of pregnant women in developing countries are iron-deficient, and it says a nutrient-depleted mother is likely to deliver a child who faces the same health challenges. Aid tends to target both pregnant women and babies but skips the girls in between. Chris Dendys plans to close that gap. The program she directs, Right Start, improves the nutrition of women across nine countries in Asia and Africa and recently expanded its reach to include tweens and teens, with the aim of helping over 100 million females.

Chris Dendys The Micronutrient InitiativePhoto, Reynard Li.

Tatiana Fraser & Caia Hagel

Authors of Girl Positive: Supporting Girls to Shape a New World, Montreal Tatiana Fraser and Caia Hagel are out to change girl culture. The authors, whose resumés are stacked with female-empowering projects, believe pop culture too often frames young women as one-dimensional stereotypes. So they met with girls and women, ages nine to 29, across North America, holding group talks and one-on-one interviews in major cities, like Los Angeles, and small towns, including Wemindji, an indigenous community in Northern Quebec. Racial, economic and cultural diversity were top of mind as they discussed everything from self-harm to binge drinking to how women are portrayed in media. They collected their dispatches in a book called Girl Positive, which spotlights real-life struggles, like the crushing pressure to meet beauty standards. It also focuses on the many ways girls are changing their own lives, from one who is pushing for consent in sex-ed curricula to another who is producing a misogyny-free hip hop album. They’re also amplifying the conversation through a companion website, girlpositive.ca, where kids can log on and tell their own stories because, as Fraser says, “that’s the truest, realest information we could ever present.” 

Tatiana Fraser and Caia HagelPhoto, Reynard Li.

Fiona Sampson

Founder of the Equality Effect, Toronto Human rights lawyer Fiona Sampson founded the Equality Effect in 2010 to help girls around the world seek justice. The group’s most ambitious project is called 160 Girls, named after the number of young Kenyans who contacted the organization for legal help after they were raped (one in three Kenyan girls experience sexual violence). In 2013, Sampson and her team won a class action suit against the Kenyan government for failing to protect the girls. The ruling introduced a new standard that compells police to investigate all reports of sexual assault — a previous rarity in the country. 

Fiona SampsonPhoto, Reynard Li.

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Farah Mohamed

Founder of G(irls)20, Toronto In 2009, Farah Mohamed launched a shadow G20 devoted to the economic success of girls and women, dubbed G(irls)20. The organization’s flagship program gathers one delegate between the ages of 18 and 23 from each G20 country, plus representatives from the European and African Unions, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East and North Africa. “We have girls at the table who have travelled the world,” Mohamed says, “and some who have never been on a plane before.” This year’s summit took place in Beijing and focused on a promise made by the G20 leaders back  in 2014: to create 100 million new jobs for women, globally, by 2025. It’s a “bold, audacious and completely achievable goal,” says Mohamed. But, she adds, those jobs must be full-time, well paid and sustainable. As a society, we’ve accepted that education is a huge game changer —  just look at the push to get more girls into the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) programs. Now, Mohamed says, we need to ensure they have the opportunity to practise those hard-earned skills.

 

Farah MohamedPhoto, Reynard Li.

More:
Why 338 inspiring young women are taking over the House of Commons
10 amazing Canadian women whose stories you need to know
10 women who were political trailblazers

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