DREAMS Partnership Grant: Leadership Training for Adolescent Girls and Young Women

PEPFAR announced the DREAMS (Determined, Resilient, Empowered, AIDS-free, Mentored, and Safe) Partnership on World AIDS Day 2014. In 2015, DREAMS was planned with full grassroots participation. In 2016, DREAMS implementation began in ten countries of Sub-Saharan African countries including Mozambique.

DREAMS focuses on HIV prevention interventions for Adolescent Girls and Young Women (AGYW) from 10 to 24 year olds. The program provides a comprehensive package of core interventions to address many of the factors that make girls and young women particularly vulnerable to HIV, including gender-based violence, exclusion from economic opportunities, and a lack of access to secondary school and broad components, such as parenting/caregiver programs and the specific evidence-based curricula for HIV and Violence prevention.

The goal of DREAMS is to deliver on bold U.S. targets by supporting a multi-sectoral core package of interventions that goes beyond the health sector, addressing the structural drivers that directly and indirectly increase girls’ HIV risk, including poverty, gender inequality, sexual violence, and lack of education. The DREAMS Ambassador program was initiated in 2016 as way to recognize that adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) have limited access to adolescent friendly services that respond to their sexual reproductive health needs. The participation and leadership of AGYW is essential in the decision-making processes implementation of interventions and in the that affect their lives to achieve better health for AGYW.

The focus of this program is to select and train AGYW to advocate for the rights of youth, provide leadership for DREAMS interventions, and to link their peers to the services available (in the community, schools, and the health centers), in order to maximize the impact of the DREAMS program.

Among of the responsibilities of the DREAMS Ambassadors, their mission is to generate public attention for the DREAMS program and the problems that affect adolescent girls and youth in their communities and being and be the public face in existing structures such as girls’ clubs and safe spaces in the community.

Mozambique still has one of the highest numbers of early pregnancy and female school drop-out it also ranks very high in lack of opportunities for young women to actively raise their voices in the society. One of the roots of this problem is related to the absence of female role models at all levels across all levels of the society. This has contributed towards a cycle of poverty perpetuated throughout generations limiting opportunities for girls and women.

The applicant should provide a grassroots leadership training with innovative models of education focused on adolescents girls and young women to amplify talent, raise gender equality and promote sustainable transformation by empowering girls and young women to be the next generation’s changemakers through mentorship models.

The approach of the leadership training needs to be based on a holistic vision of circular leadership and active citizenship (community, civic and participatory) that recognizes the individuality and complementarity of each being in the circle, with awareness that the girls and women can be the intergenerational reference models

During this training, the group enters a conceptual questioning aimed at deconstructing and re-signifying concepts (leadership, management, power). From there it expands to a vision of leading for the common good and deepens its understanding of reference models practices, intentions, and relationships.

Finally, it dives into building its own profile and a collective leadership manifesto. In conclusion, this approach recognizes the dynamic and evolving nature of a leadership profile that is constantly being updated and, as such, will never be completed or crystallized.