An American entrepreneur empowers young women and girls in Togo to become financially independent by getting an education and earning an income.
Style Her Empowered (SHE) is a female-founded, female-led grassroots organisation based in Togo, a West African nation on the Gulf of Guinea.
SHE’s mission is to create sustainable education and employment opportunities for women and girls in Togo.
The Story Behind SHE
Founder Payton McGriff, a former marketing major at the University of Idaho, established SHE in 2017 as part of a class project that tasked her with setting up a business or nonprofit.
McGriff was inspired by the bestselling book Half the Sky, which she read in her sophomore year, written by Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.
Half the Sky discusses the oppression of women and girls in the developing world and explores how their potential can be unleashed, turning oppression into opportunity.
“Talent, resilience, and resourcefulness are so equally distributed worldwide, but opportunity is not,” said McGriff.
Reading about the plight of women and girls around the world changed McGriff’s perspective and inspired her to start up SHE to combat gender inequality.
After winning the Idaho Entrepreneurship Challenge, McGriff was awarded $35,000 in seed money, giving her the means to fund her new venture.
University of Idaho professor and Togo native Romuald Afatchao encouraged McGriff to visit his hometown of Nôtse in southern Togo to do field research over spring break.
Empowerment Through Education
It was during her trip that McGriff was confronted with the reality of what women and girls in Togo were facing. According to UNICEF, 119 million girls across the world are out of school.
Togo has one of the highest rates of gender inequality in the world. The average Togolese woman only has three years of education and 55 per cent of Togolese women are illiterate.
Only 35 per cent of girls remain in education beyond elementary school, with many dropping out once they reach puberty, resulting in 1.6 million women in Togo without an education.
“In much of the world, women and girls are responsible for the lion’s share of household duties and so a woman’s perceived value is what she can contribute to the home,” said McGriff. “It’s seen that girls won’t ever be putting (their) education to use.”
SHE endeavours to change this. When a girl enters SHE’s programme, they receive a school uniform, a scholarship, school supplies, a reusable menstrual kit, and a year’s worth of tuition from local teachers.
“When you educate a girl, you educate a community,” said McGriff.
In 2022, 1,500 girls in rural Togo received full education sponsorships from SHE, resulting in 99.1 per cent of students passing their exams and progressing to the next grade.
In 2023, SHE launched a mobile learning lab which supplies students with educational materials and enables the SHE team to travel to inaccessible schools to deliver workshops in under-resourced communities.
Launching the SHE Uniform
SHE’s sustainability journey began when McGriff noticed how girls were quickly growing out of their school uniforms and unable to afford replacements. This was creating fabric waste and preventing girls from attending school.
Noticing a gap in the market, McGriff set about creating a school uniform that would last longer and not produce unnecessary fabric waste. In 2021, the SHE uniform was born.
The SHE uniform expands by six sizes and up to a foot in length due to the extra fabric hemmed underneath the dress. It’s designed to grow with a girl over three years so that once she’s outgrown her uniform, she can hand it down to younger students.
The dress has a tailored fit for every body type at different stages of growth and can be adjusted for each girl using cords running along the side of the dress.
“To put their uniform on for the first time is one of the most joyous experiences that we see,” said McGriff.
SHE’s Sustainable Backpack
But McGriff didn’t stop there. In 2022, SHE launched a backpack made from 100 per cent recycled single-use plastic bags. These backpacks were durable and waterproof, allowing students to carry and protect their school supplies during the rainy season.
In the following year, SHE managed to collect over 500 lbs of plastic waste through community cleanup events which were later transformed into backpacks.
Addressing Period Poverty
In May 2023, to commemorate Menstrual Hygiene Day, SHE launched a menstrual health awareness campaign across six cities in Togo.
Period poverty affects 500 million women and girls across the world who lack access to menstrual products and hygiene facilities.
To tackle this, the fabric waste from SHE’s factories is recycled and turned into reusable menstrual pads. These reusable pads are a safer option than chemical-based plastic pads and they’re an affordable alternative to disposable pads.
SHE has donated over 15,000 menstrual pads to women and girls over the years and is selling menstrual pads across Togo to support the program.
The organisation has sold more than 2,000 menstrual pads during outreach events and provided menstrual health education to over 6,000 women.
Creating Employment Opportunities
Poverty remains the largest barrier to education for girls and women in Togo. Almost 70 per cent of the rural population live below the poverty line on less than $1.90 a day.
To give women opportunities to become household earners, SHE hires women from low-income backgrounds without an education as seamstresses in their factories.
The employment package includes a host of benefits such as free childcare, salaries 75 per cent above Togo’s living wage, and paid time devoted to adult education, ensuring that women in the workplace can thrive.
Before working at SHE, 75 per cent of seamstresses had never been to school. Through the paid-to-learn model, after one year of employment, 192 hours of education were completed by the seamstresses in 2022 and all of the seamstresses had achieved basic literacy and numeracy in French.
Vision for the Future
To date, SHE has evolved from a class project into an international organisation serving 1,500 girls annually and employing over 30 women across 21 rural communities in Togo. SHE also partners with 42 schools in the southern region of Togo.
McGriff currently runs SHE remotely from Idaho, but her ultimate goal is for the project to become self-sustaining so that locals can support themselves.
“The vision for starting SHE was always for it to become locally led because local women understand the challenges and the solutions far better than I ever could,” McGriff said.
McGriff has plans to replicate SHE in other countries around the world where access to education is limited due to poverty.
SHE currently has a GoFundMe that aims to raise $25,000 in donations so that they can enrol another 500 girls in the programme for the upcoming school year.
“When you’re a part of SHE, you’re a part of this movement. I may have struck the original match that started SHE, but what I’m so beyond inspired by is watching our team carry the torch.”
Click here to donate to SHE’s GoFoundMe.
