Suadela has a mission to increase young women and girls’ power by building their negotiation skills. Specifically, we focus on contexts where girls are at high risk of dropping out of school because families tend to invest more in their sons’ education, while their daughters are often withdrawn from school at an early age and married against their will. Research has shown that a promising approach to encourage girls to stay in school is to teach them to negotiate with authority figures in their lives. The Suadela Project will bring negotiation training to the girls who need to make their voice heard. First, we will train local college educated women to become negotiation coaches and deliver after school negotiation training and bootcamps. In parallel, we are also exploring innovative pathways to scale the impact of negotiation training for girls in Africa.
Our plan is to develop an online training platform accessible through a mobile app, because we want girls to be able to keep developing their negotiation skills and learn from the community of peer negotiators. The Suadela mobile app will give girls access to pedagogic resources such as videos showing real life situations in which they could practice their negotiation skills in their contexts, online simulations and games that could be played individually or in teams from any part of the world. The platform will also include resources and training material for negotiation coaches. We plan to launch our first pilot in Mali, where our team has a solid field experience in education, and then expand to Francophone Africa.
