Imagine Her

Our Work

Imagine Her was founded 4 years back with the purpose of Providing tools and collaborating with communities as key advocates to prepare pathways for women and girls’ socio-economic independence.

Originally launched to improve women’s menstrual and reproductive health, the organization pivoted in 2016 towards economic empowerment following a survey of beneficiaries and the wider community. Imagine Her promotes women’s socio-economic independence in Uganda, preventing vulnerability and exploitation via a human-centric model that delivers practical tools in social entrepreneurship training. This provides vulnerable women and girls with skills in business development and ownership, social leadership, and a sustainable income. The organization is also driving a systemic shift in women and girls’ reproductive and maternal health rights by changing behavior – e.g. educating men and boys on how to support pregnant partners and be present partners and parents after the birth, and changing traditional birthing practices to drive greater acceptance of having qualified midwives present during the birthing process.

Problem; Economic Dependency 

Globally, Uganda is ranked 3rd in the world for the country with the highest economic dependency rate (99.5%). This is attributed to multiple barriers to economic independence, which include among others the extremely high youth unemployment - 83% for people 15-24 years old. Despite the numerous efforts to reduce this trend, economic dependency among women and girls remains high as a result of limited access to resources such as capital, land, and the skills needed to get employment. As a result, women and girls are unable to access economic opportunities, quality education, and health care services.

The continuing trend of economic dependency among women and girls not only escalates poverty in the family but also breeds gender-based violence and gender inequality, maternal and infant mortality and drives women and girls to adopt other means of survival, such as adopting odd jobs, early marriages as well as sticking to abusive relationships, a multi-generational phenomenon if not tackled.

The Solution

Imagine Her believes that women’s and girls’ access to education, economic empowerment training, reproductive and maternal health services are key to their socio-economic independence. To drive this, sustainable, community human-centered solutions must be adopted and implemented in collaboration with girls, women, their families, and the community at large. Our work is therefore centered on providing women and girls with training and tools in social entrepreneurship, kick-starter financial boosts, mentorship as a means of equipping them with the skills to drive sustainable economic growth, social leadership, and independence but also enhance their abilities to independently, individually and collectively contribute to the fulfillment of their reproductive and maternal health.

What We Do

We provide tools that help women attain economic independence, live fulfilling healthy reproductive lives, raise happy and healthy children, and contribute to the betterment of their communities through individualized and community-driven programming.

We accomplish this through two core solutions: 

Individualized Woman/Girl Centered Solution

Becoming

Working with primary & secondary school girls, our solution is Becoming, an all year round program that creates opportunities for young girls to develop their potential in leadership in their communities at a tender age. The program goes beyond developing the leadership skills of young girls through community service projects and adaptive leadership but supports the young girls’ academic and learning needs through experiential learning opportunities delivered through a design thinking curriculum and mentorship.  

Social Entrepreneurship Training

To create economic independence among girls and women, we empower them to fight pressing social problems with market-oriented approaches, providing access to top-level training and mentoring through a human-focused context and social entrepreneurship. Our Social entrepreneurship model is 6 months of incubation training delivered to selected female participants between the ages of 18-30. The curriculum is tailored to focus on topics including; Social & Adaptive Leadership, Personal and Mindset Growth, Design Thinking, and Management of Social Enterprises. In addition to the training, the beneficiaries are provided with interest-free revolving seed loans to launch their social and business ventures plus a tailored business and leadership lifelong mentorship from prominent women peers.  

Community-Centered Solution

We work collaboratively with the communities to improve girls’ and women’s efforts to improve their reproductive health and support community efforts to improve maternal health indicators through two.

rePAD: 

rePAD a community-based approach targeting to drive men and boys as key stakeholders in the attainment of girls’ and women’s reproductive and menstrual health. We deliver this through trained reproductive health practitioners and trained rePAD school mentors, community clubs and aimed at giving girls and boys the skill for making reusable sanitary pads, skills, and information broadly on reproductive and menstrual hygiene management, both in-school and out-of-school 

Safe Mum: 

With 16 mothers dying on a day to day basis while giving birth, we believe the basic contributors to this need to be tackled first hand. Safe Mum is a community-based approach that builds the knowledge of local communities to identify, report pregnancy danger signs thus reducing maternal mortality rates and improving the children’s survival rates. We achieve this through; trained community-based qualified midwives who work as fellows deployed in the community to take charge of referral of emergency pregnancy cases but also charged with organizing community support groups and coordinating advocacy services within the villages. 

Our Impact

We aim to leverage the power and potential of every girl and woman, developing an empowered female generation in Uganda who will transform their families and communities and drive sustainable development economically and socially. Since 2016, the organization has achieved:

• Trained 200 young women social entrepreneurs and innovators aged 17-30 years:

• 30% of whom are refugees
• with a 100% graduation rate and 90% business survival rate
• 7,000+ community members directly impacted through the social ventures they have established
• Beneficiary profit is 40% higher than for other women-operated businesses in their communities

• 3,500+ girls, boys, and community leaders empowered with reproductive and menstrual information and trained on how to make their own reusable sanitary pads

• 2 villages impacted through the Safe Mom Pilot (ensuring midwives present at births)

. 1 school benefiting from the Becoming pilot project with a total of 16 girls going through our pilot curriculum.