Give to Gain: Offline Dreams in an Online World!

In classrooms powered by hope instead of electricity, teenage girls sit with sharp minds and restless curiosity, learning about a digital world they have never been allowed to touch. They can describe a computer they have never used, imagine software they have never seen run, and dream of futures their schools are unequipped to support. These girls are bright, ambitious, and ready yet they are being quietly locked out of opportunity simply because their schools cannot afford computers, reliable internet, or even the power to turn a screen on. This is what inequality looks like in the modern world: not a shortage of potential, but a failure to invest. And when we choose not to give to these girls, we lose far more than we realize.

I know them, I was one of them.

That is why I return again and again to mentorship session. In community halls with borrowed chairs or in classrooms with cracked walls, sometimes under trees that double as lecture rooms when buildings fail us. Marginalized teenage girls who are not limited by their IQ score but by circumstances. Girls whose futures where negotiated long before they were asked what they want. Girls whose potential is treated like a luxury rather than a future possibility.

They sit on wooden benches polished smooth by generations before them, listening carefully, taking notes, asking questions that lead nowhere because there is nowhere for them to go next. They learn about technology from chalk diagrams and secondhand explanations. They memorize definitions of computers they have never touched, imagine innovations they will never be allowed to practice. Their potential lives inside them, restless and unresolved, waiting for permission to exist.

When lessons end, curiosity has no outlet. There is no screen to stay behind for, no keyboard to explore and no internet to wander through and discover that girls like them are building apps, leading tech companies, and shaping the digital world elsewhere. Instead, the message settles quietly but firmly, “this future is not meant for you.”

Over time, the absence of opportunity becomes something heavier, hope begins to fed and doubt floods their emotions. Even the most passionate encouragement begins to feel fragile when it is not backed by something real. We tell them that they are capable, that they should dream boldly, that the future is theirs but each day they return to the same classrooms without tools, the same lessons without practice, the same promises without pathways.

Mentorship gives them language for possibility, but without tangible opportunities, that language slowly loses meaning. Hope, when repeatedly deferred, begins to dim. Confidence weakens not because belief was false, but because reality keeps contradicting it.

They start to wonder if inspiration is just another story told to keep them patient. If being told you can without being shown how is simply another way of saying not yet or worse, not for you.

And so, even the brightest girls learn to protect themselves by expecting less. Not because they stopped dreaming, but because dreaming without access becomes painful. This is the quiet tragedy: when opportunity does not follow mentorship, belief has nowhere to stand.

They begin to question their intelligence, not because they struggle to understand, but because the world never gives them the opportunity to prove their capabilities. They wonder if ambition is arrogance, if curiosity is disobedience, if dreaming too loudly makes them difficult. They learn to lower their voices, to shrink their hopes, to exchange confidence for caution.

This is what it means to be left behind not because they are incapable, but because access never reaches them. Not because they lack vision but because the world withholds the tools that would allow them to see themselves clearly.

And when we choose not to give these girls opportunity, we do not simply lose talent. We lose the confidence, creativity, and leadership that could have transformed communities, industries, and generations. All these are replaced by teenage pregnancies, early marriages and scouring levels of Gender Based Violence.

This is how inequality reproduces itself quietly, efficiently and unfairly. Not because marginalised girls lack talent but because the tools they need are rationed away from them. Some girls are told they are “not good at science” or “not suited for technology” when the truth is simpler and more painful, they were never given the chance to try.

Yet I have seen what happens when a girl realizes she matters. When she is given the opportunity to showcase her capabilities. When a girl learns to love herself, she stops accepting violence as normal. She stops believing that suffering is her destiny. She begins to ask harder questions about education, about marriage, about her body, about her future. She starts to imagine a life beyond survival.

This is why giving to girls changes everything.

When girls are supported to stay in school, early marriages decline and futures expand. When women-led initiatives are funded, safe spaces remain open and mentorship programs do not disappear overnight. When girls are equipped with digital tools electricity, computers, internet they are no longer observers of the future. They become its architects.

I have seen teenage girls once at risk of dropping out return to school and become peer educators. I have seen survivors of violence transform into advocates who challenge harmful norms in their own communities. I have seen grassroots women’s groups build peace not through grand speeches, but through persistence, care, and courage.

These transformations do not happen by accident. They happen because someone gave time, trust, resources, opportunity.

When we give girls education, we gain leaders.

When we give women resources, we gain peace.

When we give communities the tools to protect and empower girls, we gain futures that are safer, fairer, and more resilient.

The tragedy is not that there are girls without potential. The tragedy is that there are girls with potential but the world chooses not to see, girls born in the “wrong” places, girls whose brilliance does not come with connections. Girls whose dreams are delayed because funding disappears and priorities shift.

They are not asking for miracles. They are asking for a chance. International Women’s Day 2026 invites us to reflect on what we are willing to give in order to gain a more equal world. The answer must go beyond symbolism. We must give funding to women-led movements and to girls education, give trust to grassroots leadership and give protection where silence once lived.

Because when we give to women and girls, we do not lose. We gain communities free from violence, we gain economies strengthened by inclusion, we gain a generation of girls who grow up knowing they are worthy, not someday, but now.