When a Girl’s Future is Lost, So Is a Community’s Growth
This week, I received devastating news from our alumni WhatsApp group. Frida Makere, one of our students from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, has passed away at just 24 years old. The message stopped me in my tracks. These aren’t just names on a screen or girls who attend our workshops. These are young women we’ve trained, encouraged, and hoped for. Women with ambition, potential, and stories to tell. Frida was one of them. She came through our program in 2023, thoughtful, quiet, and observant. She hadn’t yet found her full voice, but it was coming. She was working towards it, like so many of the young women we serve, despite the overwhelming odds.
Hearing of her passing felt like more than the loss of one life, it felt like the loss of a future that was just beginning to unfold. It left me thinking deeply not only about Frida, but about what happens to a community, a sector, and an economy when a girl like her is lost too soon.
Frida Makere, lost too soon. 2001 - 2025.
What We Lose When We Lose a Girl
In many parts of Africa, a girl’s success is not hers alone. One young woman’s education, job, or small business often supports five or more people; siblings, aging parents, extended family, and sometimes even entire villages. This is the essence of the circular economy in African communities: when a girl rises, she lifts others with her.
Frida was on that path. She took part in the first cohort of our photography and storytelling program in Tanzania in 2023, recruited from the Journalism and Advertising program at The University of Dar es Salaam. Quiet, determined, and deeply committed, she had dreams of becoming a journalist. But last year, she put those dreams on hold to care for her father, who was ill, and help run the family shop. This kind of sacrifice is not uncommon. Many young women must trade potential for duty, not because they lack ambition but because their circumstances leave them little choice.
When a girl like Frida passes away, we don’t just lose her potential. We lose the future jobs she might have created, the stories she might have told, the truth she could have uncovered, and the dignity she would have brought to her community through the lens of her camera. We lose the ripple effect she would have set in motion.
The Unseen Cost to the Media Industry
Africa’s media spaces are still deeply male-dominated. At Cameras For Girls, we exist to change that by training and equipping young women to enter the media field with confidence and skill. Women like Frida are critical to building a more equitable, representative media landscape, one that reflects the full spectrum of African life, from a woman’s perspective. When women’s voices are missing, so are the untold stories of the rural and urban women in the community. Men cannot capture the same stories with empathy and lived experience, simply because they don’t know how to cover it from this angle.
The loss of Frida is a loss to this collective vision. Her voice will never be added to the growing chorus of African women who are challenging stereotypes, shaping narratives, and documenting the realities of their communities.
We Cannot Measure What We’ve Lost—But We Can Honour It
Frida’s passing is a painful reminder that the stakes of our work are not abstract, they are deeply human. Each girl we train carries within her the power to transform her life and the lives of many. When we lose even one, we lose a thread in the tapestry of change we’re working so hard to weave. So today, we grieve. But tomorrow, and every day after, we double down on our commitment to ensure that more girls like Frida not only dream but also get the chance to live out those dreams fully, loudly, and without apologizing.
Please support our work so that we can train more girls like Frida.