International Day of the Girl Child 2024: Visions for the Future
On October 11th each year, the International Day of the Girl Child recognises the unique challenges faced by girls around the world and celebrates their resilience.
In 2024, Evoca Foundation joined this celebration and call to action by illuminating the power of hope as a force for change. For this year’s campaign, we held a series of interviews with girls participating in the work of our brilliant grassroots partners. We are sharing their voices, visions, and hopes with you, our community, so that we can celebrate their resilience together.
In creating this campaign, our aim was to shine a light on hope’s transformational qualities. The challenges faced by girls around the world are exacerbated by climate change, the continued prevalence of gender-based violence, and educational inequality. So Evoca Foundation and our partners work daily with girls who are courageous and hopeful in the face of the major challenges posed by gender inequity.
Hope affords us all a vision for a future that is brighter and better, but these hopes first need to be heard. In sharing girls’ voices and visions, we wanted to capture a real sense of what it means to reach for a brighter future in the face of adversity and to champion the incredible impact of the grassroots organisations Evoca partners with.
The Bella Foundation is a small, grassroots organisation working to end child marriage in Nigeria by supporting girls and young women to stay in education. The Braveheart Ladies Football team, also in Nigeria, supports girls to overcome barriers of stigma and social pressure and follow their dreams in sport. We spoke to the girls these organisations work with, asking them about their daily lives, their passions, and their hopes and visions for the future.
The interviews provided insight into the girls’ daily lives, dreams, and aspirations, and also created a space to preserve the innocence and playfulness of girls who risk having their childhoods torn from them at a young age. In the beautiful and often joyous insights shared by our participants, we discovered hope and an incredible capacity for creativity, a love of learning, and joy in the simplicity of childhood. The girls’ passions and aspirations are bold and inspired, ranging from football to medicine, from acting to altruism, from dancing to SpongeBob SquarePants. Such aspirations speak to a better world and a brighter future, embodying the power of hope in the face of adversity.
In creating this campaign, we are inspired by the resilience of girls who are every day embracing the spirit of hopefulness. We ask you to join us in pursuing a vision of a brighter world: one in which girls are empowered and protected, their voices are heard, their rights upheld, and their hopes and aspirations made reality.
Please note that in some instances, the thoughts, feelings and experiences shared by the girls are presented in composite and anonymised form in order to protect their identities: the figures profiled in the campaign are inspired by the girls we’ve spoken to and feature their direct quotes, but do not represent specific individuals.
How You Can Get Involved:
Share their stories. Post about this year’s campaign on social media and tag us. Each share helps bring these girls’ dreams to life, spreading their joy far beyond their communities.
Dive deeper into the Bella Foundation’s work to keep girls in school and end child marriage here, and learn how the Braveheart Ladies Football team is transforming the lives of young girls through sport here.
Follow us on Instagram to see more stories of hope from the girls involved in our campaign. Your engagement helps lift these voices even higher.
What we’ve learned through this campaign is that joy can be a form of resistance, a way to hold on to hope when the world seems to offer little of it. These girls, through their laughter, their dreams, and their sheer determination, are building something beautiful—something the world needs to hear.