Weekend With Girls: Building Confidence One Camp at a Time
Forty girls. Two days. A curriculum built around self-worth, leadership, and possibility. The Weekend With Girls initiative is small in scale but transformative in impact.
Sandra Achare Besong
Board Member, Youth Programme Lead
The Weekend With Girls initiative began with a simple observation: the Foundation's Youth Development programme was reaching young people of all genders, but the girls in the programme were less likely to speak up in group sessions, less likely to put themselves forward for leadership roles, and more likely to drop out before completing the full programme cycle.
The reasons were not mysterious. They were the same reasons that girls across Cameroon — and across the world — hold themselves back: the accumulated weight of messages, explicit and implicit, that their voices matter less, their ambitions are less legitimate, their futures are more constrained.
Sandra Achare Besong, a board member and the programme's lead for the initiative, had a different view.
“We do not tell girls what to be. We create a space where they can discover what they already are.”
"We do not tell girls what to be," she says. "We create a space where they can discover what they already are."
The Weekend With Girls is a two-day residential programme for girls aged 14 to 18, held twice a year. The curriculum covers self-worth and identity, leadership and communication, financial literacy, and career exploration — but the delivery is deliberately different from a classroom. It is experiential, relational, and built around the girls' own experiences and aspirations.
The first cohort of 40 girls attended in March 2024. By the end of the weekend, facilitators had observed a measurable shift: girls who had been silent on the first morning were leading group discussions by the second afternoon.
"What happens in those two days is not magic," says Sandra. "It is what happens when you take a group of young women, tell them their experiences are valid, their voices matter, and their futures are theirs to shape — and then give them the tools to believe it."
Follow-up surveys conducted three months after the programme found that 78% of participants reported increased confidence in speaking up in school or community settings. 65% had taken on a new leadership role — in a school club, a community group, or their family.
The initiative is small. Forty girls twice a year is not a solution to the structural barriers that girls face. But it is a beginning — and for the girls who attend, it is often the beginning of something they carry for the rest of their lives.
