Let's eradicate harmful cultural practice that hinder the girl child from attaining education

Mwandja grew up in Congo, where he had to flee for the war. Since then Mwandja has been living in a refugee camp in Tanzania. He finished high school and for a long time he has been working a changemaking activities. He was a member of the child parliament, in order to raise awareness for children’s rights. They were hoping to change the behavior of people in his community, especially concerning child marriages and violence against children. Next to that, Mwandja worked at the radio station of one of our Children’s Peace Prize winners Baruani. In the Action Developer phase Mwandja started a project called "Let's girls say no to early marriage". The project focused manually on emancipating the girl child from social norms and taboos that hamper their development and on educating the community about children's rights, especially the girl child most affected by adult actions. The project was successful to some extent because Mwandja managed to reach out to part of the refugee community. There was some impact on a relatively large part of the society, even though Mwandja still feels the need to reach people. Mwandja will continue his activities for the rights of the girl child which he did as Action Developer as Fund Catcher, since they are still a lot of people in his community (Nyarugusu refugee camp in Tanzania) that need education in this sense and a change of mentality. He wants to conduct focus group discussions with girls and the community in order to gather insight about their perspective of the rights of girls, which will help him in his further activities. He will also conduct an awareness campaign together with local leaders; together they will reach people by going door to door or street to street in the village to educate people on the right to education of girls and on the bad effects of child marriage. He wants to work with local leaders since they are very influential and people can easily understand and listen to them. Mwandja will also do trainings on the rights of the girl child and then conduct interviews will all the participants.