The WONDER Foundation

DÜSSELDORF, Germany — The WONDER Foundation began operating in 2012 with the commitment to provide women and girls in poverty with the education and training to generate long-term community-wide change. In its first decade, the women-led organization partnered with local women in more than 20 countries across Africa, South America, Europe and Asia, and empowered more than 100,000 women and girls.

UNESCO reports that 118.5 million girls worldwide are unable to attend school and that two-thirds of illiterate adults are women: with earnings increasing by approximately 10% for every additional year of education, inaccessible schooling is a considerable barrier to combating poverty. The WONDER Foundation has noted the power of education for women in particular, how it provides the resources to make safe and informed choices, the chance to invest in their communities and improvements in maternal and familial health.

As a result, it aims to support projects promoting women’s education and training: speaking with The Borgen Project, Olivia Darby, The WONDER Foundation’s co-founder and Chief Programmes Officer described the ambitions behind the organization’s origin. “We were a group of young women who were idealistic,” Darby said. Despite their different origins and experiences, the founders were united by the realization that incredible women-led projects were being “overlooked” all over the world. Lack of funding, resources and connections meant that programs geared towards educating and training women and girls received negligible attention. They sought to change that.

The WONDER Foundation’s international approach has led them to found partnerships worldwide and encounter a variety of local contexts: their project in El Salvador took place between the territories of two rival gangs, resulting in “gang violence, […] violence against women, […] trafficking and lack of opportunity,” whereas for the women WONDER work with in India, “everything goes towards her marriage, not her education,” resulting in an “entirely different cultural context.” UNICEF noted that the detrimental effects of child marriage “lead to an intergenerational cycle of poverty.”

Despite these differences, Darby observes a universal pattern of a feeling of insignificance among marginalized populations that contributes to their cycle of poverty in a non-quantifiable way: “I think a problem across the world is that the most vulnerable people feel like they aren’t important […] if people don’t see that there is a value in the fact that they exist, then it makes everything else so much harder.” The attention that everyday survival demands from individuals in poverty hinders them from being able to inspire their families and communities as they otherwise might: as a result, WONDER’s partnerships share the common goal of restoring individuals to their sense of importance.

On a practical level, WONDER’s partnerships range from hospitality training to education in health care to the social integration of migrants. It works exclusively with locally- and female-led organizations that incorporate its pillars of “having empowering spaces, incorporating mentoring, […] offering a quality education and [ensuring]that that education leads not just to a certificate but to good economic prospects”. Darby emphasized the value and importance of the local knowledge that their partners have; awareness of community needs ensures that the programs will initiate positive, sustainable change for the women in the region. WONDER, meanwhile, provides funding and resources for growth, taking care to ensure that the partnership will be mutually beneficial: “It’s about finding that balance, that it’s truly empowering for the local partner and of course a good use of our donor’s resources,” says Darby.

The WONDER Foundation also takes pride in facilitating the transfer of local knowledge between projects and fostering mentoring practices with their partners. With questions in mind such as “Do women and girls have a mentor? Someone who can champion them and believe in them […]?” WONDER highlights the importance of a functioning mentoring practice: as Darby explains, this not only achieves a “long-term impact,” but also results in low drop-out rates across programs. Its use of EMPath, an American model from the Centre on the Developing Child of Harvard University, reveals a science-based approach to ensure effective mentoring that is “adaptable to local contexts.”

WONDER’s partnerships with ISSI – the DRC’s leading institution for vocational health care and nursing training that has impacted almost 600 women since the collaboration began – and Junkabal – providing training and education to young girls and their mothers living around rubbish dumps in Guatemala City – have been serving as a step towards alleviating inequalities and helping young women and girls out of poverty since 2015 and 2013 respectively.

Darby spoke of one woman’s story from its project in Kenya that had particularly inspired her: Cecilia had hit a low point in her life, estranged from her older children, pregnant and sleeping in the marketplace with neither a home nor an income. After attending two or three of WONDER’s program’s sessions, she began to take it seriously and now runs a thriving business with plans to expand, employing two of her older children and hoping to engage other women in difficult circumstances in the future. “She feels significant […] she is positively affecting not only her own life but that of her whole family,” Darby explained. WONDER has worked in Kenya for eight years and has since impacted the lives of more than 400 women.

The WONDER Foundation treasures the “excellent relationships” it has with its partners, determined to continue to meet the demands of each project without spreading itself too thin while remaining observant of new opportunities for partnership. Raising its money exclusively from “donations and legacies” and “charitable activities,” the organization reinvests the majority of this into its charity work around the globe.

The WONDER Foundation has so far partnered with more than 30 local women-led organizations, working to create sustainable, long-term change for impoverished women, their families and communities.