Every day, all over the world, women endure physical and psychological violence in many forms. For this to change, women everywhere need to learn to stand their ground and fight, and above all, believe that they have a right to respect, safety and a life of their choosing. The question is: how can such empowerment be achieved? After growing disheartened by the world of “charity” work, Ginie Servant-Miklos & Alexander Whitcomb decided on an unusual answer to this question: they decided that they would use martial arts a tool to fight gender inequality.

FairFight works in with local martial arts trainers and their dojos in partnership with local organisations and schools in the community to help empower underprivileged girls through martial arts in Zimbabwe and India.  Our long-term goals are threefold:

1. Listen, Help, Empower: We want our girls to actualize into their most empowered self, and we want the boys in their community to be respectful partners in that process. But with the best intention in the World, we Europeans cannot come in and define what that empowerment will look like in the context of our girls’ lives. Instead we must ask: what does that empowerment look like from the perspective of our girls? How can we help them once we know that?
2. Support Local Dojos: we want an international community of strong dojos as the starting point where empowerment can take place. Our dojos need to be literally strong – well equipped, with a safe space to train, and good quality classes – and more abstractly, they need to be role models for change. And since it’s a community, we all need to learn from each other and strengthen each other.
3. Bring the Community on board, become self-sustaining: We want the local community of the projects to feel emotionally invested in our projects and to want to engage with us. We also want our communities in our own dojos to feel invested in the work we do in Zimbabwe and India. An engaged community makes the message stronger and our projects more sustainable. Our third goal is to engage the local community and make our project self-sustaining.​

To achieve our goals, we developed a theory of change:

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Project stages

FairFight projects are usually run in the following stages:

- Stage 1: Start-up phase, building connections with local martial artists, taking in the first group of girls, supply of basic equipment
- Stage 2: community-building phase, building a dialogue with the local town, the girls’ teachers, their parents (if they are involved in the girls’ lives), their siblings, the boys of the community, taking in a second group of girls, providing greater support to the local martial artists based on an evaluation of their needs
- Stage 3: legacy-building phase, building a bricks-and-mortar training facility, sponsoring and supporting international tournaments and engagements, connecting our fighters into a global martial arts network.

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