By Mayowa Adebile
Every year, governments, nonprofits, development agencies, and philanthropists invest millions of dollars in programmes designed to empower girls. Across Africa and around the world, girls attend leadership camps, learn digital skills, receive financial literacy training, and participate in mentorship programmes. These investments matter. They have opened doors, expanded opportunities, and helped countless girls see possibilities they may never have imagined.
Yet I keep returning to a simple question. What happens after the training ends?
What happens after the certificates are handed out, the leadership camps conclude, and the motivational speeches fade? What happens when girls return to their schools, their families, and their communities? For many girls, the answer is surprisingly familiar. They return to the same challenges they left behind. The same barriers still exist. The same decisions continue to be made without them. They leave with new knowledge, greater confidence, and bigger dreams, but very few opportunities to put those things into practice in ways that shape the communities around them.
That is why I have come to believe that teaching girls new skills, while essential, is only part of the journey. If our goal is to truly empower girls, we must do more than prepare them for leadership someday. We must trust them with opportunities to lead today.
For years, the development sector has measured success by the number of girls reached, trained, or mentored. Those numbers matter. They tell us how far our programmes have travelled and how many lives we have touched. But they do not always tell us what happened next.
Did those girls become problem-solvers in their schools? Did they influence decisions in their communities? Did they organise others around issues they cared about? Did they begin creating change that continued long after the programme ended?
These are harder questions to answer, but perhaps they are the ones that matter most. Empowerment is often described as giving girls knowledge, confidence, and opportunity. I believe it should also mean trusting girls with responsibility. Leadership does not begin after graduation, after employment, or at some distant point in adulthood. Leadership begins the moment someone is trusted to contribute, to make decisions, and to help solve problems that affect their own lives.
This shift in my thinking did not happen in a meeting room. It happened while working alongside adolescent girls in their own communities. What I saw was not a lack of ideas. It was not a lack of passion or willingness to contribute. Girls were already paying attention to what was happening around them. They spoke openly about school absenteeism, menstrual stigma, safety concerns, harmful social norms, and the everyday realities shaping their lives.
The problem was not that girls lacked solutions. The problem was that they were rarely invited to be part of creating them. Too often, programmes were designed for girls rather than with them. Adults identified the priorities, designed the interventions, and defined what success should look like. Girls participated, but they rarely led.
That observation changed the question I was asking. Instead of asking, “What should we teach girls?” I began asking, “What problems are girls already seeing in their communities, and how can we support them to become part of the solution?”
That question became the foundation of Ashake Foundation’s Girls in Local Action (GILA) model.
The GILA model is built around four simple but intentional ideas. First, girls listen. They observe their communities, identify challenges, and understand the realities around them instead of having those realities defined by others. Then they learn. Through mentorship, leadership development, and practical skills-building, they gain the knowledge and confidence needed to respond. Next, they lead. Rather than waiting to be assigned a role, girls identify the issues they care about and take the initiative to act. Finally, they localize. They apply what they have learned within their own communities, creating solutions that are practical, relevant, and rooted in local realities.
At the heart of this model is a simple belief: girls are not merely beneficiaries of development. They are capable of shaping it.
This also requires us to rethink the questions we ask about our programmes. Are we simply transferring knowledge, or are we creating opportunities for girls to exercise leadership? Are girls helping shape the priorities of the programmes designed for them, or are they only invited once those priorities have already been decided? When we measure success, are we counting attendance, or are we looking for evidence that girls are influencing decisions, solving problems, and creating lasting change within their communities?
These are not abstract questions. They determine whether our programmes produce participants or leaders. I recognise that this approach is more difficult to fund and measure than a traditional training programme. Girl-led, community-driven action does not fit neatly into a logframe built around fixed outputs. But perhaps that is exactly the point.
Maybe our measurement tools need to catch up with what real empowerment looks like—not only in attendance sheets and completion certificates, but in the initiatives girls begin, the communities they influence, and the leadership they continue to demonstrate long after a programme has ended.
Perhaps it is time to retire one of development’s most familiar phrases: “Girls are the leaders of tomorrow.” It is a hopeful statement, but it quietly postpones something that is already happening. Girls are not waiting to become capable of leadership. They are already leading wherever they are trusted with the opportunity.
Communities are strongest when the people closest to a challenge are trusted to help solve it. Girls are no exception. They bring insight, creativity, resilience, and lived experience that no programme design can replicate. Our responsibility is not simply to prepare girls for a future role. It is to recognise the leadership they already possess and create meaningful opportunities for them to use it today.
Because the future of girls’ empowerment will not be defined by how many girls we train. It will be defined by how many girls we trust to lead.
Mayowa Adegbile is the Founder and Executive Director of Ashake Foundation, a Nigerian nonprofit focused on women’s economic empowerment and adolescent girls’ development, with over 13 years of experience in the development sector.
