Melinda Gates believed in the power of daughters to change the world. Rebecca Soni reminded us to never give up on our dreams. Milly Businge exposed us to the realities of child marriage’s impact on girls. These women, and the other bloggers contributing to the first leg of the Global Mom Relay, have made this first leg of relay so powerful.

As Girl Up gets ready to pass the Global Mom baton, we’re so thankful to each of you that have read a story and shared it online to help unlock donations to Girl Up from Johnson & Johnson and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. You’ve taken thousands of actions to ensure that girls around the world can continue to be supported.

The work for women and girls does not stop with Girl Up. The next leg of the Global Mom Relay will highlight the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a United Nations Foundation initiative that advocates for the use of clean-burning cookstoves around the world.

Girls and women in developing countries are often expected to spend large parts of their day searching for driftwood to use in wood-burning stoves

  • They often go out on their own searching for wood, sometimes putting themselves in risky situations where they may be attacked, which is highly prevalent in war-torn areas
  • Girls and women spend upwards of 20 hours a week searching for wood. This is time not spent getting an education in school or becoming economically empowered through a job
  • Since women and girls are often the ones doing the cooking, they are consistently coming into direct contact with the smoke caused by unclean cookstoves, which contributes to 3 million deaths per year

To celebrate passing the baton, join the Global Mom Relay Twitter party on Thursday, 3/21 at 1 pm EST! Follow the hashtag: #GlobalMom. Join Girl Up and the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves as they discuss highlights of the first two weeks of the relay, look at what’s coming next, and learn more about the mutual work of our campaigns to help girls.