I've had the incredible opportunity to work on a research team with Dr. Vyas and Dr. Nagaraj as they evaluate and monitor the Girl Rising program. Girl Rising is an amazing organization that seeks to shift inequitable gender norms for adolescent girls by doing outreach and teaching specific curriculum about girls' empowerment in schools across the globe. They recently expanded into Ghana and Mexico, and I was thrilled to join the team last year as a first year in my MPH program. I had heard about the Girl Rising program and it was one of the reasons I wanted to be involved in research at GW.
I have learned so much in my short time as a research assistant, including knowing how to develop evaluation tools such as logic models and data collection manuals, learning how hard it is to actually create a survey tool that evaluates a domain such as gender attitudes, gender equitable environments, and financial literacy. I was reminded of the very iterative and sometimes painstaking process of developing surveys, focus group guides, and interviews that needed to be reviewed word-for-word. I learned how to liaise with in-country partners in both English and Spanish, in-person, and over Zoom, as well as provide training on data collection efforts.
Best of all, I got to travel to Mexico City in January 2023 as we met with our Mexico partners who would actually be doing the implementation of the Girl Rising program. I helped lead the training for the data collection in Mexico City and we traveled with our partners to pilot test the surveys we had worked so hard on. It was so rewarding to get input from our key partners, and best of all, the students in Mexico that were so bright and eager to start the program. It was amazing to see something start-to-finish.
Since then, I've helped to communicate and coordinate with our in-country partners as we've monitored data collection. There's nothing like the rush of getting data in, as only public health nerds will know! We are currently getting ready to pull together the data to publish, and forging ahead with year 2, encouraged by the results from year 1! I'm so grateful to be a part of such an amazing organization that is really seeking to impact women and girls in a momentous way. I have really been encouraged that the way to prevent violence against women and girls is to shift the social norms early on in the community, and I believe Girl Rising is doing just that.