Cameras For Girls
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Mission Statement
Cameras For Girls pursues Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality in Africa using photography as our catalyst. We provide women who face gender-based barriers to employment with a camera to keep and a 4-phase photography, storytelling, and business-skills curriculum to support their goals of becoming paid journalists and photographers in male-dominated spaces.
About This Cause
Cameras For Girls' mission is to address poverty and gender inequality in Africa. We do this by teaching photography and business skills to young women and girls who want to become journalists. Would it surprise you to learn that females cannot enter the workforce as journalists unless they own a camera or know how to use it? Cameras For Girls solves this problem with the gift of a camera to keep, and our 4-phase photography, storytelling, and business skills training program. We partner with local universities across Africa to recruit students who are either in their last year of studies or who have graduated but cannot find work because they lack either a camera or the skills to use it. Phase 1 is a 4-day intensive workshop in our host country. We give each girl a camera to keep (valued at $600 CAD) and teach her how to use it. Over the 4-days we teach her how to tell stories using the camera as a tool. On the 4th day, we work with a local NGO so that the girls get field practice, learning how to build a story from the ground up. In return for providing us access, the NGO receives completed stories and photos they can use in their marketing. The girls get their first published piece they can add to their portfolio. Phase 2 starts two weeks after the founder and executive director, Amina Mohamed, returns home to Canada. She continues the training by teaching via Zoom every week. The students must turn in bi-weekly photos from practicing and a monthly assignment to move their skills forward. The students also have access to an online purpose-built training curriculum, and photo editing in a purpose-built lab hosted by partners in each country we operate. Phase 3 assists the girls in building a resume and LinkedIn profile. Amina also supports learning proper business skills, such as making a business plan, budgeting, etc. This work is done with the assistance of volunteers. Phase 4 is a 6-month mentorship program that assists those females who could not attain employment during the course to work with a volunteer mentor on their specific goals. Thus far, we have taught photography and business skills to 64 females in Uganda, 15 in Tanzania, and 10 in South Africa, as well as over 125 girls and women on our online platform, all between the ages of 19 and 29. We are proud to report that 75% of these girls now have full-time jobs as journalists, photojournalists, or photographers; some even work in communications and PR. We raise funds to purchase Canon G1 Cameras for the young women in our four-phase program, run our four-day workshops, and cover the travel costs of our executive director, who is also the main trainer of our workshops. Since 2018, Cameras For Girls has worked solely in Uganda but expanded to Tanzania in November 2023. We plan to add an additional country every year moving forward, with plans for Kenya in 2025. Your support will change the face of the male-dominated media landscape across Africa by giving skills-based training to young women who want to use other voices and their talents to highlight important issues women face across the world while escaping the clutches of poverty by assisting them to get fair-paid work.