Check out the newest issue of The Girl Gazette: Volume 5, Issue 1 for Winter 2024! The Girl Gazette amplifies the voices of girls globally and empowers them through art, poetry, and more. We highlight girls around the globe who are a part of our Partner Coalition organizations.
Youth Ambassador Gladys Njeri shares her experience participating in the Girls First Summit, She’s the First’s annual event that brings together organizations for knowledge-sharing and targeted training, with local and global insights on best practices for supporting girls’ rights.
While menstrual stigma has long been a political topic, one Hon. Gloria Orwoba made a very public plea for women’s and girls’ rights this year in a new and different way. A first-time senator, Hon. Orwoba made her way to the Kenya Parliamentary session on 14th February 2023 in clothing that had menstrual blood. She was asked to leave halfway through the session after her fellow parliamentarians requested the speaker to eject her for supposedly violating the house’s “dress code.” Hon. Orwoba’s actions made a strong statement to advocate for free pads for school girls and female prisoners. As a young woman at the forefront of addressing Period Poverty, this was such a relief for me.
The month of April memorializes sexual violence awareness month. For generations, women have heavily yet wholeheartedly shared the stories of their battles and redemption—empowering other girls to be unafraid to do the same. In the Philippines, a haunting history still lingers: the sexual enslavement of women during the occupation of the Japanese Imperial Army in World War II.
You may be pondering why a mere high schooler is writing about paychecks when the relevance of a salary to a child's life is minimal; the truth is, I'm terrified of growing up in a world where my work is valued significantly less than my male counterpart. Undervalued to the extent that women statistically earn only 83% of what a man makes. This everyday experience of women across the globe is known as the Gender Pay Gap.
