Reflecting on 2024: A Year of Growth, Impact, and Resilience at Cameras For Girls

As 2024 comes to a close, we’re reflecting on an incredible year of progress, challenges, and life-changing impact. For Cameras For Girls, this year was about expanding our reach, deepening our commitment to providing skills-based training to more African women, and taking bold steps toward gender equality in male-dominated media spaces across Africa.

With your unwavering support, we’ve built skills, created new partnerships, and, most importantly, “INpowered” young women to tell their stories, find their voices, and lead confidently.

Just a note: You will not see “empowered” as a term but rather “INpowered,” as these young women already have the power within; we just need to bring it out of them.

African girls with their cameras

Our Impact in 2024: Changing Lives, One Camera at a Time

1. Graduating Change-Makers in Uganda:
This year, we celebrated the graduation of our 4th cohort of students in Uganda. Of the 15 women who began our program, 11 are now fully employed in media-related careers as journalists, photographers, or communications professionals. Their journey wasn’t easy, but their success proves what happens when young women are given the right tools, training, and a supportive community.

2. Expanding to Tanzania:
In Tanzania, we hosted our second cohort of students in Dar es Salaam, where 15 young women joined a 4-day intensive workshop. Highlights included a powerful session by guest speaker Asha D. Abinallah from Tech and Media Convergency, focusing on online safety and reducing gender-based violence. The discussion shifted to critical topics like staying safe online, a pressing issue in Africa where such lessons are rarely taught.

3. Train the Trainer Program:
We launched the Train the Trainer program, an initiative to empower program graduates to mentor the next generation of students. This ensures long-term sustainability while embedding leadership and mentorship into the core of our mission. These trainers are not only teaching skills but also modelling what it means to be a woman leader in a male-dominated field. The five young women in this first cohort of trainers will confidently lead five cohorts of 15 women each as a part of our strategic growth plan in Uganda, starting in March 2025. Stay tuned for more details to come.

4. Online Learning Hub:
Recognizing the need for accessible resources and considering the challenges around cyber security, we built our Online Learning Hub on a more secure platform to provide free courses on photography, ethical storytelling, and professional development. Open to young women across Africa, the Hub includes courses on building a professional LinkedIn profile, networking in male-dominated spaces, and storytelling for impact. Participants also gain access to a WhatsApp support group, fostering community and collaboration.

Stories That Inspire Us

Every student’s journey is a testament to the power of opportunity. When you open the door to learning, you show her, her potential to achieve whatever she dreams of.

Joyce Mollan, a graduate of our Uganda program, has become a freelance photographer and personal photographer to a Ugandan minister. She dreams of starting her own media business and training more young women in her community—a ripple effect of empowerment that inspires us all.

Another participant, Conslanta Ikiring, shared how the program transformed her both personally and professionally. “I’ve grown as a storyteller and as a person,” she said. “I now have the confidence to step into spaces I once thought were not meant for me.”

Catherine Nakirya, a former participant from 2022, stated the program's effect on her as a filmmaker/storyteller and the transformative impact it had on the girls she went on to train in her village—creating a ripple effect of change.

These stories, alongside countless others, remind us why our work matters.

Learn more about our student’s success stories on our website at https://www.camerasforgirls.org/our-students.

Overcoming Challenges and Strengthening Resilience

This year wasn’t without its hurdles. Like many small nonprofits, we faced funding challenges, from reduced donor engagement to the struggle of scaling our impact with limited resources. Despite these challenges, our commitment to the mission remained steadfast.

With the help of volunteers and mentors, we continued to innovate, build capacity, and provide life-changing opportunities. Volunteers like Alex Sekitoleko, a Ugandan photographer and storyteller based in Uganda, played pivotal roles in mentoring our students while our Canadian team tirelessly supported operations, fundraising, and strategy.

Additionally, we faced delays due to external factors, such as postponing meetings in Kenya amid political unrest. Despite this, we successfully approached Aga Khan University’s Graduate School of Media and Communications and other University partners to speak about our proposed expansion into Kenya in the 3rd quarter of 2025.

Staying steadfast to our United Nations SDG goals of #1 - No Poverty, #5 - Gender Equality, #8 -Fair and Paid Work, and finally #17 - Partnership for the Goals allowed us to reach across the aisle to form strategic partnerships with more university partners, NGO’s and media associations and groups.

New Partnerships and Initiatives

Mental Health Support:
In 2024, we recognized the urgent need for mental health support for our students, many of whom face workplace harassment and gender-based discrimination. While we’ve yet to establish a formal network, we’ve formed partnerships with Jo Bell, a Holistic Success Coach based in Ireland, who will do three online sessions with our students in January, and Shamala Hinrichsen, who has offered her app SheHer to our students to learn about their bodies and what is acceptable and not acceptable when it comes to gender-based violence. We will also seek funding to build a program suitable for our students while we seek partnerships to integrate counselling services into our programming in 2025.

Collaborations for Growth:
This year also marked the beginning of new collaborations with international organizations like Creative Writing for Social Change in the US, Lead Podcasting in Canada, and AMWIC in Kenya. We also created deeper connections with local mentors and media professionals in Africa. Partnerships are vital to our success, and as we grow, we will continue to seek vital collaborations and partnerships so we can bring more resources to our students.

Looking Ahead to 2025: Our Most Ambitious Goal Yet

In 2025, we aim to expand our Uganda program from 15 to 75 young women, requiring 75 cameras and additional resources for a series of five workshops. The need for this is simple - it’s vital to remember that we are an International charity, so having local leaders within our student base helps African women learn from African women, which is where true impact and sustainability go hand in hand.

Our Fundraising Goal:
To achieve this, we’ve set an ambitious target of $34,429 for Giving Tuesday and year-end fundraising. With your help, we believe we can turn this vision into reality.

Please support us today in reaching more young women across Africa with photography, ethical storytelling, and business skills to turn their dreams of working in male-dominated media spaces into reality.

Our vision is to impact 30,000 women in 7 African countries by 2030 - but we can only do this with your support.