What We Do

The Institute for Faith and Gender Empowerment works through four main programs to promote gender justice and health equity.

Click to learn more about our programs & their impact.

Male Engagement on Gender Equality Program

Youths & Reproductive Health Education Program

Pan-African Faith Leaders Annual Conferences

The Girl Child and Her Long Walk to Freedom

Male Engagement on Gender Equality

This program is designed to engage and transform men, boys and traditional leaders in the community to end gender based violence. Through our faith-inspired training curriculum, we engage and equip men with gender and health equity knowledge to lead change and transformation in their local communities

We equip male champions as community mobilizers and trainers on transformative masculinities, gender dynamics focusing on the importance of changing social norms related to men’s ideas and behaviors, ways to avoid and end gender-based violence, and the importance of understanding and supporting reproductive health for women.

Training goals include:

How men can support health equity and gender justice for women and girls and learn to live gender-equitable lives as equal human beings.

How men can transform patriarchal mindset, ideas, and practices associated with masculinity and manhood to be champions for gender justice.

How the spheres where men and boys are socialized and often learn inequitable norms – homes, schools, work, sports, religion, the media, and others – can be changed.

The male engagement program addresses gender equality issues in three parts:

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Dialogue on Gender Relations, Gendered Social Norms, and Masculinities,

which discusses the context of societal gender norms and their impact on human behaviors actions.

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Building on the Changes

and the success stories, which outlines the broad shifts in men’s attitudes, and the gender equitable policies and programs.

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Promoting Gender Equitable Norms among Men and Boys

through community-based dialogues and engagement of men and boys on sexual and reproductive health, and connections with gender-based violence relief resources.

Reproductive Health Education

This program is intended to provide adolescents, youths and young mothers with the knowledge and skills on sexual and reproductive health in order to reduce rising cases of teenage pregnancy, early/child marriage, female genital mutilation, and high HIV/Aids prevalence, among other health challenges

Our approach is to equip and build peer mentors and agents of change among the youths, adolescents, and young mothers with sexuality and reproductive health education to affect change and transformation in health equity.

The program is culturally relevant with content and skills that target key behavioral outcomes and promote healthy sexual development. The curriculum is age-appropriate and planned across grade levels (adolescents, youths, and young mothers) to provide information about health risk behaviors and experience.

Rwanda Youth delegates sharing opinions during group discussions

Pan-African Faith Leaders Conferences

IFAGE hosts annual Pan-African Faith Leaders conferences to engage key faith leaders, faith-based gender practitioners, researchers, civil society groups, and other key stakeholders on “faith and gender reconciliation”. During these gathering, IFAGE provide safe spaces and opportunity for faith actors, to constructively dialogue and have safe conversations on three broad topics;

Gender mainstreaming and women leadership in Church and Community.
Biblical and theological basis for gender equality.
The role of faith leaders in promoting peace, gender justice, and health equity

Our main objective is to build a movement of faith leaders across Africa to promote a transformative approach which reshapes power imbalance and structural policies, and which deconstructs theological narratives, connecting them with lived experiences of women and gender-based survivors, and to enhanced Coalition building among faith actors to work together for gender justice and reconciliation.

The Girl Child and Her Long Walk to Freedom Leadership Program

The Girl Child & Her Long Walk to Freedom Leadership Program is a joint project of the Imago Dei Fund and the Institute for Faith and Gender Empowerment. It was launched in 2018 with a mission of bringing a contemplative and historic awareness to the intersection of faith and gender inequality and helping people “put faith to work through love,” to transform the deep roots under the global patriarchy.

The primary component of this program has been an immersive six-month reading journey created by Emily Nielsen Jones, co-founder of the Imago Dei Fund, and the Reverend Domnic Misolo, co-founder and executive director of the Institute for Faith and Gender Empowerment, with its core values of curiosity, awareness and liberation.

This leadership initiative has two main programmatic components:

The Girl Child Reading Journey
The Girl Child Video Collaborations Program

1. The Girl Child Reading Journey

The Girl Child Fellowship is anchored in the reading journey.

This fellowship (GFC) is a strategic community investment in leadership and activism to support a small cohort of faith-inspired change agents who have already demonstrated brave and curious leadership to work to untangle some of the vexing contradictions that exist at the nexus of religious faith and gender inequality. The GCF is a leadership development/reinforcement opportunity for change agents who don’t typically have access to leadership opportunities.

Through this opportunity, Fellows will have:

Space to deepen their intellectual inquiry into the historic structures which underlie and perpetuate the patriarchal social norms which devalue girls’ humanity right from the womb and make them vulnerable to a systemic pattern of overwork, harmful traditions, abuse, neglect, and basic disrespect.
Opportunity for contemplation to connect with their own souls, to cultivate inner freedom to ask questions, sort through their own religious and cultural beliefs, and tap into and clarify what is the deepest essence of faith that can “move mountains” (in particular those fortified by religion).
Peer learning with a small cohort of brave faith-inspired change agents from around the world working at the intersectional space of faith, gender equality, and community-led social change.
Opportunities to refining their strategic thinking and maximize the impact of a project already underway or something new that is calling their names.

Fellowship Focus – The main curriculum of the fellowship is the Girl Child reading journey which is a deep dive into the origins of patriarchy as the world’s oldest oppression/slavery and an invitation to walk the exodus path to truly leave this social structure in the past and take the next steps towards a promised land where all can live in freedom. Fellows will work on a capstone project that they have identified (or are already working on to) to address some problem in their own context that they can flesh out, workshop, and get feedback on from the cohort

2. The Girl Child Video Collaborations Program

Translations and Cultural Adaptations – We have translated the Girl Child animated video explaining the roots of patriarchy in Kiswahili, Portuguese, French and Hausa. A Burmese translation is also in the works. We have worked on these translations with local faith inspired leaders and faith-based organizations such as Tearfund. We have also produced a sequel to the video with DAI for educational purposes. These videos have reached over 20,000 people through social media platform.

The Girl Child Storybook Project for Children and Families – We are working with Tearfund on a children’s storybook based on the Girl Child video. This project is currently being piloted in Nigeria with five churche communities. The storybook will be integrated as a learning tool for children and families going through Tearfund’s Transforming Masculinity program.