Adolescent Girls' Advocacy & Leadership Initiative (AGALI)

Within each focus country, AGALI strategically selects a cadre of leaders committed to implementing progressive multi-sectoral strategies to improve the human rights, health, and socio-economic wellbeing of adolescent girls. AGALI Fellows include civil society leaders and advocates, policymakers, health care providers, religious leaders, journalists, educators, and young women themselves. These Fellows conduct workshops within their country, for activists and organisations, as well as adolescent girls.

AGALI’s capacity building workshops are grounded in principles of diversity, culturally relevant expertise, and collaborative leadership to advocate for improved laws, policies, and government funding to fulfill the needs of and create change. Through participatory methodology and experiential learning, AGALI's workshops are designed to strengthen leaders’ capacity to advocate for policies and programmes that benefit adolescent girls.

Through its grant-making programme, AGALI also provides funding and resources to locally-led advocacy initiatives. AGALI invests in advocacy projects that increase girls' access to education and livelihoods, promote girls’ democratic participation, reduce sexual violence and early marriage, and address other critical issues facing adolescent girls.


AGALI also uses video advocacy as a tool to disseminate the work of its Fellows to a wider audience, including the production and distribution of digital stories, interviews with AGALI Fellows and adolescent girls, and short documentary features. A short documentary highlighting the impact of child marriage on girls in Malawi and the role of advocacy in addressing this critical issue can be found on the AGALI website.

Education, Women’s health

According to AGALI, adolescent girls disproportionately bear household burdens, are often unable to access economic and educational opportunities, and face social, physical and psychological violence. In addition, young women are subject to legal and political frameworks that negate their human rights, and often suffer the consequences of unwanted pregnancy, early childbearing, unsafe abortions, and HIV/STI infection. AGALI therefore works to build the capacity of local and national leaders to develop innovative policy and programmatic solutions to the challenges facing adolescent girls and young women in Sub-Saharan Africa.