Facebook

Facebook’s mission to bring the world closer together and build communities is complemented by Girl Effect’s understanding of vulnerable girls and expertise in creating content for them. By providing access to skills, ideas, and knowledge – and crucially – role models and peers across multiple geographies, new communities are enabled and formed.

Facebook supports Girl Effect to reach girls around the world with the content and information they need to make choices and changes in their lives - especially in places where access to the internet can be difficult.

Facebook's Free Basics platform provides people with access to useful services on their mobile phones. The websites on the platform are available for free, without data charges, enabling more people to experience the benefits of connectivity, thus improving lives. Girl Effect has partnered with Free Basics through our Springster brand, which became a content provider on the platform. The entertaining, educational and empowering content is now available in 15 countries and eight languages - reaching 2 million girls.

Using Facebook’s platforms, we are using social media across Africa and Asia to reach girls where they are already looking for information, entertainment and to be connected to others. For example, in India and South Africa, girls have sent 1.2 million messages to Girl Effect’s chatbots on WhatsApp and Messenger asking questions about sex and relationships. 

With Facebook’s Data for Good team, we are using Facebook’s tools to close the gender data gap and analyse the impact of our work online. In India, we partnered with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and Facebook to launch Point Toh Hai, a social media campaign that tackled vaccine hesitancy that was stopping young mothers in India from vaccinating their children. 

This included creating a rap battle video between a young mother (Meenal) and her mother-in-law, as well as a visualised WhatsApp conversation between Meenal and her friends - to tackle misinformation head-on in a light-hearted and relatable way. The 3-month campaign reached 7.1 million young women and mothers in the Hindi belt with essential information about immunisation. A focused impact measurement survey ran for a month of the campaign showed that, among women who saw the ads, there was a 3.8 percentage point increase in perceptions that vaccines protect children from life-threatening diseases.