In her own words

Viola Vaughn: 10,000 Girls is a real simple program. It was actually started by a 9-year-old girl who came to me wanting help in getting out of third grade. Before we knew it, we had 4 girls, then 20-- now 1467. It's the girls' own program; I just inserted a few structural guidelines:

1. Only girls in the lower third of their class, those who have left school, those who have never been to school are eligible;
2. We give them materials [textbooks and supplies], time and a place to learn…and we talk to the parents;
3. We're independent!

VV: [Laughing] Yes, We're basically independent. We have volunteers, and we have private sponsors that assist us. We don't have any government funding at all. The girls who are out of school support those who are in school. We do cookies and juice; we have a pastry shop. The girls learned to make dolls; we sell them in the U.S. We opened a shop in Kaolack in 2003. The girls run everything-- they do all the accounting. We incorporated as a 501(c)(3).

VV: It's really a simple program: Girls helping girls make money for themselves. The girls are all employees; they're paid. The business is growing. We sell our stuff everywhere. Demand exceeds supply! We need to grow to meet demand.

VV: We need a website, we need to fund-raise, not to "give" money to the girls, but to get an industrial kitchen, a food truck, the equipment we need to grow. We are social entrepreneurs and we need investors! We plan to serve 10,000 girls within 7 years.

VV: Well, you know, I looked at the data. There are about 160,000 school-age girls in the Kaolack region. Less than 40% of them even start first grade-- of that 60,000 girls [having entered primary school] only 15 of them [a quarter of 1%] graduate from college. There are numerous pressures on girls to leave school at each stage-- to help out at home or in a family business [often by age 10], to prepare themselves for marriage and homemaking, as opposed to outside employment. Girls who juggle school and home responsibilities often fail or perform poorly in school, which contributes to a cycle-- parents don't see good school results-- decide their daughter[s] are more useful at home-- feel they can't afford the cost of school materials, if they aren't producing good results-- and so on and on.

VV: [smiles] You know there is. And ironically, when you educate a girl, she educates the entire family-- about health care, hygiene, nutrition, family planning-- She learns more than just how to read. When a female is better educated, her family's health improves, and the family size declines.

VV: We've seen remarkable results so far: in Kaolack only 18% of girls pass to the next grade each year; in our program it's 68%… more than 3 times the general rate....