An Interview With AdAmi’s Founder Kirsty

Kirsty (and Elsie!) with the MEANS team in Bo, March 2020

What have been the highlights for the AdAmi Project this year?

We’ve got lots to celebrate this year, despite the many challenges and uncertainties caused by Covid-19. A personal highlight was living in Sierra Leone for two months with my family at the beginning of 2020. It was a great opportunity to spend more time with the team and to come up with new ideas for pushing the project forward.

A highlight for the AdAmi Project more generally was the launch of the workplace apprenticeship programme, thanks to significant investment from one of our donors. This programme gives the girls the opportunity to spend 18 to 24 months receiving on-the-job training in a local workplace, in vocations like auto-mechanics, welding, or tailoring. The goal of this programme is to help them learn the skills they need to hopefully secure long-term employment. Already, we have supported 40 young mothers into the programme and they are all doing brilliantly so far.

What have been the biggest challenges the AdAmi Project has faced this year?

Covid-19 has obviously caused a great deal of disruption to our work with some of our plans and activities having to be paused or adapted as a result. For example, the schools in Sierra Leone were closed from March until October and that directly impacted many of the girls in our programme. We knew that school closures would lead to these girls being even more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse - the country saw a spike in adolescent pregnancies when schools were closed during the Ebola outbreak - so we quickly drew up a plan to keep them engaged and supported. Our mentors did a great job of checking in with them all on a near-daily basis, and setting up small study groups. We also bought the girls radio sets so they could tune in to the lessons which the Government had delivered over the radio. Thankfully, all of the girls remained in the programme and are now back in school.

This is a real cause for celebration because, irrespective of the pandemic, we have to be honest about the challenges the girls have to continually overcome in order to complete their time in the programme - from juggling child care with their learning to meeting the demands placed on them in the home in terms of cooking and cleaning, for example. We work hard to help the young mothers overcome such challenges and to tailor our support as needed. But it’s important to note that it’s an ongoing process that takes years rather than weeks or months, and there are always bumps along the way.

Has anything surprised you this year?

I have been amazed by the initiative some of the girls have taken to reach other young mothers in need. When I went out to Sierra Leone in January, I set out with the idea of establishing an alumni programme, encouraging girls who had graduated from the programme to stay involved and to give back to other young women in a similar situation. But what I found was that some of the girls had already started doing this under their own steam.
In one community, a few of the girls had identified lots of other young mothers around them who were in extremely tough situations, and had come together to work out how they could best support them. They set up a study group with between 15 and 20 other young mothers, meeting twice a week. At these meetings the AdAmi girls shared learnings from their own mentoring sessions, covering a range of themes, from sexual and reproductive health to becoming more confident as a young mother. The group also provided a safe space for the young mothers to share their concerns and challenges and to support each other. It has been wonderful to see how committed the AdAmi girls have been to supporting others and to see the ripple-effect of our work, sparking a change throughout the community.

Were there any particularly moving moments?

It’s always moving to see the transformation in the young mothers we support. When I went to Sierra Leone in 2018 to scope out what we could do as a charity, one of the girls I met, Tiangay, had been thrown out of the family home and was living in a derelict building, sharing one room with her daughter and a friend, but facing the prospect of becoming homeless again. When we spoke to her, she was in tears and seemed totally helpless. But now, Tiangay is one of the most confident and outspoken girls on the programme; she is doing really well at school, has a great relationship with her family, and is well-respected in the community. It’s amazing to see how much she has turned her life around, and to have been able to play a part in that.

It always makes me proud to see what the girls go on to achieve after they have been through so much. They have often experienced sexual abuse, stigma and discrimination, extreme poverty, and have been abandoned by their family, left to support themselves and a baby on their own. Most of us wouldn’t know how we’d be able to cope in such a situation. But these girls have such resilience and determination against all the odds and it is incredible to see how they start to envision a future for themselves, and to see their aspirations as being within reach.

Have you learned anything in particular this year?

Well, the pandemic has certainly taught us to expect the unexpected and that sometimes no amount of planning can prepare you for what lies ahead - you need to be open to change and quick to respond and adapt as required to suit the changing context and need. This, I believe, is key for making sure that our work remains relevant and needed, and has the impact we want.

What are you most looking forward to in 2021?

We’ve got lots of exciting developments in the pipeline, including the launch of an AdAmi Girls’ Network where we will support young mothers to set up their own grassroots advocacy programmes, focused on raising awareness and support for their rights and in tackling the stigma they face. We want to support them to become vocal and inspiring young leaders, demanding justice and having an equal voice and standing in their local communities. It’s a very exciting new area of work for us and we can’t wait to tell our supporters more about this in the new year!

Wrapping up 2020: Adaptability, Resilience, and Giving Back