Featured Founder: Gozie Udemezue
9th October, 2009 - Posted by admin - 1 Comment
WFC welcomes submissions by women founders to our FEATURED FOUNDER series. Please email us in 200 words or less something special about your founder journey, some aspect of working with your NGO you want to share with others. Also include a recent photo of yourself. wfc@womenfounders.org
Meet Gozie Udemezue from Enugu, Nigeria
In 2006, I founded The Leadership Club for Girls, (TLCG) in Nigeria with the sole aim of reaching out to young girls in rural communities of the eastern States of Nigeria. I did this to provide leadership skills, personal development skills, mentoring, internship opportunities, scholarship grants, computer skills and health and hygiene programs for rural-based girls who most often are shy and very timid and do not have access to such programs. I experienced this as I lived in a rural community between ages 8 and 21.
Starting this group was a very big challenge as I had no initial money to register the organization. I also faced the challenge of funding the programs. I could have easily given up but for the positive results from the girls I first worked with at the Ogidi Girls Secondary School. At the point I started the project at the Ogidi School, the morale of the girls was low. The first time I had a meeting with them, I told them I was a former student of the school. They could not believe me. How could a student from Ogidi Girls achieve anything in life? These girls, before our meetings, had almost no ambition; teenage pregnancy and early marriage were very common as attested by the school principal.
Their attitude at the conclusion of our talks as shown through a meeting evaluation questionnaire, showed they now were determined to succeed.
Getting to the meetings presented me with great financial cost. Driving to the village took four hours round trip, requiring great cost to fuel my car. I was not earning a salary as I had just then resigned from a job. So it was difficult to run the Girls’ program and also provide support to other groups I was working with. But I refused to give up on the project and on the girls. Through lectures, I organized trainings for them on self-confidence, self-esteem, career choice and assertive skills. And to boost their morale, I organized a party for them to commemorate the day of the African Child. This party was an eye opener for the school management. The girls they had given up on presented an excellent drama on HIV/AIDS along with cultural dances, songs and other performances. This event was like the kick the girls needed to wake up.
Some of the girls continue to contact me to update me on their successes and plans. They are still inspired by the trainings.
In time, I plan to hand over this NGO to a young woman while I play an advisory role. I am currently mentoring four young women, among whom one (the leader of the pack) will take over primary responsibility for The Leadership Club for Girls in Nigeria.
At WFC’s request, Gozie provided the following information about her
second NGO:
I founded the Healing Hearts Widows Foundation in 2008 to reach out to widows. In my area, widows are most often disinherited when they lose their husbands and are often accused of being responsible for the deaths of their spouses. In the course of my work with girls in rural areas, I found out that daughters of widows face greater difficulties and challenges as they often face the burden of supporting their mothers financially. In some cases, they engage in transactional sex to make money, some drop out of school and some marry older men early. On an informal basis, I found myself supporting the poor mothers of some of these girls so they could reduce the burden on their daughters and the risks as well.
I founded the Healing Hearts Widows Foundation as a platform to touch the lives of widows positively. We provide free medical aid, free legal aid and spiritual counseling. I have volunteer medical doctors, nurses, pharmacists, lab scientists, lawyers, magistrates and priests. Every 3rd Saturday in July, we organize free medical aid in the city, and on the 10th December, to celebrate International Human Rights Day, we visit a remote community with a medical team and other volunteers. We also visit any Church that invites us to support their widows and also hold an outreach there. This is the second anniversary for the Healing Hearts Widows Foundation; we have provided free medical aid for about 1000 widows. We receive free drugs from two big drug companies in Lagos, Nigeria and some medications here in the city where I live (Enugu, Nigeria). We receive clothing, food items and other gifts from kind people and these gifts we give to widows.
Posted on: October 9, 2009
Filed under: Featured Founder
Gozie was just unanimously elected to the WFC Board of Directors. Welcome Gozie!