Creating Literacy, Education, and Leadership for Girls
Kigali- December 15th, 2021
by: Courtney Zambello, Michelle Riccio, Carly Cote, Devin O’Donnell, and Christina Alva
Generation Rise aims to create an environment and culture that is gender equitable and allows girls and women to have equal opportunities to be leaders in their communities. To do this, Generation Rise uses literacy, education, and leadership skills as tools to increase girls’ agency and access to opportunity. Solange Impanoyimana and Enatha Mukantwari founded Generation Rise in 2016, Both share a passion of empowering young women and girls to be their best selves through education, literacy, and other key interests. The vision and mission of the organization stems from the goal to provide a safe space where girls can express themselves freely. Generation Rise fosters a culture of independence and self-motivated learning. Working with partners, schools, volunteer interns, and volunteer teachers Generation Rise is cultivating a gender equitable world where all people can be leaders and realize their dreams for themselves and their communities.
Our team worked with Generation Rise to develop policies and procedures that would enable female empowerment through the development of Safe Reading Spaces. Meeting virtually, our team developed human resource policies and procedures and job descriptions, supply chain and quality improvement manuals, QI surveys, formalized a Safe Reading Space development process, and created a mobile application to track Safe Reading Space use.
Generation Rise expects to greatly expand their organization over the next three years and the tools we developed with them will help to implement their three-year strategic plan, work more efficiently, and establish the internal systems and protocols needed to achieve their goals.
The Generation Rise Team is made up of five Masters of Public Health students from Boston University School of Public Health. Christina Alva is focusing on global health design; monitoring and evaluation and program management. She is passionate about health, program implementation, and strategy with a heart for art. Carly Cote is studying Program Management and Global Health. For the last five years, she has worked within the government sector, providing public health services at the local and state level. Michelle Riccio is studying Global Health, and Maternal and Child Health. She is passionate about sexual and reproductive health. She spent over ten years working in the private and nonprofit sectors. Most recently, she was in Malawi designing a menstrual health curriculum for a local NGO. Devin O’Donnell is studying Community Health and has focused her work on climate and health through co-building a climate and health program at Boston University. Devin has previously worked at the USEPA on climate equity work relating to Tribal and state government needs. Lastly, Courtney Zambello is studying Program Management and Global Health. Courtney currently works for Healthway at Boston University triaging COVID-19 cases.