3rd Annual National Girls’ Forum

Sunday, April 27, 2014

In all the excitement of losing my home and trying to figure out my future, I forgot all about writing a post about the 3^rd Annual National Girls’ Forum (NGF).  This was my second year on the committee planning and executing it, and other than some minor hiccups, I thought it went very well.  Each year we’ve made changes to the Forum; it’s awesome to be able to see something that you work on evolve. 

The way the Forum works is that we invite 30 Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs), 30 Host Country National (HCN) counterparts, and 30 girls for a three-day conference.  The biggest change this year was the schedule for the girls.  The first year, only a couple of girls were invited; the second year, 30 girls were invited but had the same sessions as the counterparts.  This year, we had the girls and counterparts separate almost the entire time, and tailored the girls’ sessions to them. 

The theme this year was “A Future for Girls.”  All of the girls were mostly in Life Skills sessions, talking and learning about issues like self esteem, love, and role models.  The counterparts and most of the PCVs, meanwhile, were in sessions on how to bring positive projects to their towns and villages, including finding and using resources, community needs assessments, and money management.  There was a great discussion on the theme as well. 

I was really happy with the sessions for the counterparts this year, which is where I spent my time.  Last year, we chose presenters from among the participants, usually PCVs and HCNs together.  That meant that we had some great presentations and some that fell completely flat.  This year, we asked people that we knew were excellent presenters with a lot of experience to come specifically, and only HCNs this time.  We think that Cameroonians get a lot more out of presentations done by other Cameroonians than ones done by PCVs.  We also made a lot more of an effort to make sure that we had either both a Francophone and an Anglophone presenting together, or someone to translate. 

Though I wasn’t in the girls’ sessions, they sounded like they were having a great time.  We could hear their cheering from across the hall, and whenever I went over there it just looked like they were having great conversations.  We had to keep asking PCVs to go back to the HCN sessions – everyone wanted to hang out in the fun sessions. 

My main role again this year was working on the monitoring and evaluation for the Forum.  We had the HCNs and girls’ take (different) pre-tests and post-tests to see how much they actually learned.  We also had the take daily surveys, rating each session, and an overall survey for the Forum.  Unfortunately, I had… stomach issues… for the whole Forum, culminating on the last day, so I didn’t get to see the very end.  I haven’t been able to finish entering all the data yet either, it is waiting for me in Yaoundé.  What I have looked at has all been really positive; everyone really liked the first half of the Forum at least, and from what I heard they did the rest too.

Everyone had positive things to say; the comment that I heard the most is that the Forum seemed a lot more focused this year.  At the end, I was told that some of the girls even cried because they didn’t want it to be over.  I think that the NGF is a great barometer for the Youth Development (YD) program in general.  Both have just finished their third years, and both are making amazing progress.  Though work can be incredibly frustrating here (get ready for a story in my next post), it feels great to be involved in the building of the program.  I think that for both NGF and YD, there has been a pronounced positive trajectory, and I’m glad to be a part of it.