Our Story

Our founder Kian spent the summer of 2014 in rural Kenya as part of an international team of volunteers helping to build a village school. When he visited a local primary school, he noticed that there were far more boys there than girls. He describes the experience as follows:

“I learned that while the boys were learning in the classroom, the girls were expected to stay home to cook, clean and get married at a ridiculous age. After I left Kenya, I told my mother what I had learned and that it upset me. The future of so many girls was going to waste.

She replied, “What are you going to do about it?”

I decided to take her up on the challenge. I set up a website to raise money to send 10 girls to that school. Within 48 hours I had raised more than twice the amount that was my goal, and by the end of the month I had raised enough money to send 60 girls through eight years of primary school.

So I thought, “why stop there?” If I could secure the education of 60 girls in just one month, why couldn’t I support 600? Or 6,000? Or even 60,000 over my lifetime? I decided to start a non-profit to do my share in working towards gender equality.

I founded Girls Write the Future to work towards equal access to education for girls and boys and to give other youth like me the opportunity to combat gender inequality in education.”