Girls’ empowerment begins before the first job interview, before the first business idea, and before the first leadership role. It begins when a girl is safe, learning, healthy, heard, and protected. That is why Save the Children matters in MENA.
Key Takeaways
- Save the Children is an international child rights NGO working in more than 100 countries, including across the Middle East and North Africa.
- Its MENA priorities include education, child protection, health and nutrition, humanitarian response, psychosocial support, and child rights.
- For girls, Save the Children’s work is connected to school continuity, protection from violence, child marriage prevention, mental health, participation, and resilience in crisis.
- For Bahiyat readers, Save the Children is important because women’s empowerment starts with the systems that shape girls’ futures.
Why Save The Children Matters For Girls In MENA
Save the Children works to ensure children survive, learn, and are protected. In MENA, that mission is highly relevant because children and adolescents face overlapping challenges: conflict, displacement, poverty, school disruption, climate pressure, health risks, trauma, and protection concerns.
Girls can face additional barriers because of gender norms, care responsibilities, early marriage, restrictions on movement, violence, and limited participation in decision-making. Save the Children’s work matters because it addresses the foundation of future empowerment: safety, education, wellbeing, and rights.
How Save The Children Supports Girls And Young People
Education In Crisis And Recovery
Save the Children works to keep children learning during emergencies and long-term recovery. In MENA, education can be interrupted by conflict, displacement, poverty, damaged schools, or family pressure. Girls may be especially affected when families fear for their safety or rely on them for household care.
Education is one of the most powerful forms of prevention. It can reduce early marriage risks, build confidence, improve future income, and give girls stronger pathways into leadership and work.
Child Protection And Safety
Save the Children works to protect children from violence, exploitation, abuse, neglect, and harmful practices. In MENA crisis settings, child protection can include safe spaces, case management, psychosocial support, family tracing, community awareness, and support for children affected by conflict or displacement.
For girls, protection is deeply connected to empowerment. A girl who is unsafe may stop learning, lose confidence, become isolated, or face long-term trauma. Protecting girls means protecting their future choices.
Ending Child Marriage
Save the Children identifies child, early, and forced marriage as an abuse of girls’ rights and a form and cause of gender-based violence. Child marriage can end a girl’s education, expose her to violence, increase health risks, and limit her ability to make decisions about her life.
In MENA, child marriage risks can increase during poverty, displacement, and crisis. Preventing it requires work with girls, families, communities, religious and traditional leaders, schools, services, and decision-makers.
Health, Nutrition, And Psychosocial Support
Save the Children’s MENA work includes health and nutrition, including support for mothers, newborns, and children. It also includes mental health and psychosocial support, which is especially important for children affected by war, displacement, family separation, or repeated stress.
For adolescent girls, health and wellbeing influence attendance, confidence, safety, and participation. Empowerment must include the right to grow up healthy in body and mind.
Adolescent Voice And Power
Save the Children has worked with adolescents and youth in MENA to understand power, gender, displacement, and inclusion. This is important because young people are not only recipients of services. They can analyze their own reality, identify barriers, and participate in solutions.
For girls, voice is a form of protection and leadership. When girls are heard, programs become more relevant, and communities are more likely to see girls as people with agency.
Why Save The Children Is Relevant Across MENA
Save the Children is especially relevant in contexts such as the occupied Palestinian territory, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Jordan, and other places affected by humanitarian needs. Its work also matters for Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE because girls’ rights, child protection, education, and regional humanitarian partnerships are shared priorities.
The organization helps make one point clear: if the region wants more women leaders, founders, researchers, and decision-makers tomorrow, it must protect girls’ rights today.
What Makes Save The Children Important For Women’s Empowerment
Save the Children’s contribution is its child rights lens. It shows that gender equality is not only about adult women entering the workforce. It is also about girls staying in school, avoiding violence, receiving health care, speaking up, and growing in environments that respect their rights.
For Bahiyat’s audience, this is essential. Women’s empowerment does not start when a woman is already trying to build a career. It starts much earlier, in the policies, families, schools, services, and community norms that shape girlhood.
FAQ About Save The Children
What is Save the Children?
Save the Children is an international child rights NGO working to help children survive, learn, and live protected from harm.
What does Save the Children do in MENA?
Save the Children works on education, health and nutrition, child protection, humanitarian response, mental health and psychosocial support, child rights, and resilience across the region.
How does Save the Children support girls?
It supports girls through education, protection from violence, child marriage prevention, health, psychosocial support, participation, and gender-responsive child rights programming.
Why is Save the Children relevant to women’s empowerment?
Because women’s empowerment begins in girlhood. Girls need safety, education, health, confidence, and rights before they can fully participate as adult women.
Does Save the Children work in humanitarian crises?
Yes. Save the Children responds to emergencies and supports children and families affected by conflict, displacement, poverty, and disasters.
