Protecting Girls & Enabling Economic Empowerment for Women
“It is only through the economic empowerment of women in rural areas that abusive practices such as FGM can be driven out of society”
Jaha Dukureh
Executive Director, Safe Hands for Girls
Regenerative Hubs
Regenerative Hubs is Safe Hands for Girls’ new program to enable women’s economic empowerment through regenerative agriculture.
Regenerative Hubs has brought together a team of global experts in regenerative agriculture to help implement our first agroforestry projects in The Gambia and India, with the aim of enabling women farmers to become economically self-reliant and to safeguard the environment for their children and future generations.
SAFE Schools
Safe Hands for Girls has been running a successful after school program in the Gambia and Atlanta, Georgia since 2013. Our program concentrates on educating girls about FGM, child marriage and teen pregnancy.
SAFE Schools has already enrolled thousands of girls and is now set to expand to many more schools in The Gambia, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
SAFE Advocacy
Our SAFE Advocacy program has contributed to new laws being enacted across West Africa to prohibit FGM. However, sadly many of these laws are still weak (e.g. temporary prohibitions) or are being challenged by specific religious and traditional groups.
In 2024 the FGM ban in The Gambia was challenged and Safe Hands for Girls swung into action to prevent this. We must keep the pressure up and we are doing so by engaging policy makers and communities in The Gambia, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
SAFE Training
In the U.S., approximately 513,000 women and girls have undergone or are at risk of female genital mutilation (FGM). Women and girls who were born in the U.S. may be subjected to FGM here or even during vacations to their families’ countries of origin — a practice known as “vacation cutting.”
Our SAFE Training program educates law enforcement officials and health care professionals to recognize the signs of FGM and on how to take action to enforce the Stop FGM Act and all federal and state laws that ban FGM.
Jaha Dukureh
Our Executive Director, Jaha Dukureh, has led the fight in The Gambia, Africa, the U.S. and around the world to end female genital mutilation (FGM). She is currently the Regional UN Women Ambassador for Africa and an international spokesperson for L’Oréal Paris.
Jaha was one of the youngest people ever to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for her work on FGM, won the Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal and more recently ran as a Vice Presidential candidate in The Gambia’s general election for the main progressive party in the country – PDOIS.
Jaha is also a leading international public speaker and you can invite her to speak at an event you are organizing through our contact form.
I Will Scream to The World
This extraordinary memoir details the monumental journey of one young Gambian woman from survivor of FGM and forced child marriage, to global activist and political leader who became UN Women’s first Goodwill Ambassador for Africa, one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, and among the youngest people nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
I Will Scream to the World! recounts Jaha’s ongoing, uphill journey to be seen as a survivor, activist, but most of all as a human. She dives into her childhood to show the root causes of her crusading, shares her personal and professional life, and explores, as only a survivor can, a practice that while violent and troubling, is often culturally misunderstood.
Above all, Jaha’s unflinchingly honest memoir is a story of resilience and extraordinary fearlessness, of the strength that comes with learning to love oneself, and of the power within everyone to create meaningful and lasting change.
Safe Hands for Girls – Supporting Organizations
E-mail: info@safehandsforgirls.org
Safe Hands for Girls (501c3)
229 Peachtree Street,
NE Suite 2440,
Atlanta, GA 30303,
USA
F839+H94,
Kairaba Ave.,
Serrekunda,
The Gambia