Sitting in entrepreneurship class, Payton Mcgriff, a senior at the University of Idaho at the time, was tasked with creating a nonprofit organization for a project. Thinking back to a book she read 2 years prior named Half the Sky, which examines the oppression of women in developing countries, McGriff remembered the strikingly high number of about 129 million girls worldwide who are not enrolled in school. This is due to the high numbers of poverty-stricken families in many countries who can’t afford the supplies, tuition, and uniforms many schools require. In addition, some in these poverty-stricken countries believed a girl’s education was useless as “a woman’s perceived value is what she can contribute to the home” (CNN), McGriff stated.
While taking a trip to Togo with a professor, she met Elolo, a young woman who did her chores at 3:30 am to then attend school and do her homework by streetlight, since her house had no electricity. Eventually, she had to quit school, so her brothers could continue going. McGriff stated, “Talent and resilience and resourcefulness is so equally distributed worldwide, but opportunity is not.” (CNN) Although Elolo was a bright young woman, she was denied the ability to go to school, preventing her from expanding her opportunities in the future.
After interviewing a group of girls, McGriff came to the conclusion that when asked about uniforms, it was the main reason many girls weren’t going to school. This led to McGriff to found Style Her Empowered, known as SHE. Focusing on rural communities in Togo, a small country in Africa, with 69% of households below the poverty line, SHE’s goal was to remove the financial barriers preventing girls from going to school. At first, they started with 65 uniforms from local seamstresses, however they soon encountered a problem when they realized that these were growing children, and it was not easily sustainable giving all the children new clothes every few months. So, working with seamstress, Mcgriff developed a dress with adjustable ties to change 6 sizes, allowing the girls to grow with these dresses. SHE now provides 1,500 girls a year with free uniforms, school supplies, and fees giving them the opportunity to go to school. Aswell, SHE employs a team of tutors, to ensure students are doing well in school and passing their exams. Mcgriff cares about her employees wanting to give them more opportunities in life, paying them 75 percent higher than their area’s minimum wage, giving them benefits such as unlimited sick leave and free childcare.
However Mcgriff encountered another problem, with almost all her employees being locals she realized that 55% of her workers were illiterate with no formal education. This led her to start a free program to help teach her employees the basic math, literacy, and financial skills. While McGriff supervises this non profit from Idaho, she has a group of local women running the program in Togo. The goal is to eventually make SHE a self-sustaining organization, as this was what McGriff envisioned from the beginning. This small idea, sparked in a classroom, evolved into an amazing nonprofit, helping thousands of girls change their lives for the better.
