In April, Rise Up conducted a successful Leadership and Advocacy Accelerator workshop in Nigeria through our partnership with Cummins Powers Women for 20 visionary leaders, who learned to use advocacy and innovation to create large-scale social change. Leaders participated in hands-on training based on Rise Up’s award-winning curriculum and shared their expertise with each other to develop strategies to ensure that more girls can finish school, more women have access to economic opportunities, and more communities can bring an end to gender-based violence.

Following the Accelerator, leaders were given the opportunity to propose projects and potentially receive funding from Rise Up. After a competitive proposal period and a collaborative review process with the Cummins team, we are excited to announce the selection of our grantees!

Rise Up will fund the following seven advocacy projects, which work to advance equity, social justice, and education for women and girls, with a focus on both community-level change and national-scale impact in Nigeria.

• Africa Centre for Citizens Orientation: Improving gender equity in high-paying technical jobs by increasing women and girls’ access to Information and Communication Technology education in Abuja.
• Micsmile Foundation: Increasing women’s access to free maternal and child health services by advocating for increased government funding for these services in Nigeria.
• Nenis Foundation: Reducing the gender gap in the engineering field by implementing a new curriculum for secondary schools across Nigeria that gives girls access to technical skills.
• Passion and Concern for Women Welfare and Empowerment Initiative (PACOWWEI): Advocating for the creation and adoption of policies that will protect thousands of sex workers in Abuja from violence and improve relations between sex workers and law enforcement.
• Project Alert on Violence Against Women: Protecting survivors of domestic abuse by ensuring hearings for domestic violence cases are fast tracked within the lawful 72-hour window in Lagos State Courts.
• Vaccine Network for Disease Control: Advocating for a national Gender and Equal Opportunity Bill to protect Nigerian women from all forms of discrimination within every sector.
• Youth Hub Africa: Helping girls stay in school by expanding the Universal Basic Education Act to make the first 12 years of school free for all children so that girls do not drop out because of financial pressures.