By Menachem Wecker
It took climbing a mountain for Anna Phillips to realize her calling: empowering women and promoting the role of gender in democracy.
On a seven-day “father-daughter bonding trip” climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya in 2004, Phillips and her dad met an official who was going to attend a United Nations tribunal on the Rwandan genocide. Despite a “strong religious upbringing” and an extensive knowledge of the Holocaust, Phillips, then 18, had not known about the mass killings in Rwanda.
“I was mortified that as an American and a Jew I didn’t know about the Rwandan genocide,” she says.
Phillips and her father accompanied the official to a session of the tribunal, and mortification quickly turned to action. Then an undergraduate student at GW, Phillips adopted a human rights focus in her studies. She earned a bachelor’s degree in international affairs and won a Fulbright scholarship to Uganda for the academic year 2008–09, enabling her to launch a special research project in the nation bordering Rwanda.
In Uganda, Phillips noticed that many women sat back and watched the men play sports, a sharp contrast to her experiences growing up in San Diego. Her family and community had not only encouraged her to play softball, basketball, and track and field, but she had also been the only girl on her high school wrestling team.
“When you can beat a guy in a wrestling match, he is going to respect you in the classroom,” she says.
Wanting to give Ugandan women the lessons in teamwork and confidence she had grown up with, the self-declared “realist with idealistic intentions” created a soccer program called Girls Kick It! (Anyira Gweyo in Luo) in 2006. The program partners with Global Youth Partnership for Africa, which is headquartered in Washington, D.C.
As executive director and financial manager of the program, Phillips oversees six full-time staffers, including a social worker and a dozen volunteers. The program’s annual operating budget is about $7,000, she says, and provides training, coaching opportunities and funds for international travel to tournaments for about 250 girls and young mothers.
To ensure that the program integrates with local communities, the Girls Kick It! staff meets with village elders to get their blessing and hires a respected member of the community as a coach. Though some women faced pressure from their husbands and fathers to quit the program when it called for them to travel, Phillips says for the most part the games are communal events in which everyone participates.
A particular success story, she says, is Sarah Angwech, who was a team captain for two years. A “phenomenal woman,” Angwech, who is in her mid-20s, lost her parents--one to AIDS and one to rebel activity--when she was young. “In her community she is what is called a ‘stubborn woman,’” Phillips says. “She has no problem telling men they are wrong.”
Having struggled in the public school system, often missing classes because it was too dangerous to come to school, Angwech was able to turn her life around with help from Girls Kick It! She is now using a scholarship to pursue her dream of becoming an obstetrician-gynecologist.
Phillips is also pursuing her own professional dreams. After using her Fulbright to study courageous women in the Ugandan Parliament who were ready to “commit political suicide” and to put themselves at risk to fight a corrupt system, Phillips is returning to GW to pursue a master’s degree in international development studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs.
One of her most memorable experiences at GW came at the Elliott School, when Phillips introduced Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa, president of the U.N. General Assembly, who was speaking as part of the school’s Distinguished Women in International Affairs series in 2008.
“I was floored to meet her. That was definitely one of the highlights of my career at GW,” says Phillips. “I was initially attracted to GW because I had this idea that I was going to be Hillary Clinton. I wanted to be in Washington. At GW, you are in the center of the city.”
While studying for her master’s, Phillips will also be a Presidential Administrative Fellow, a two-year program that helps students pursue a GW graduate degree while working in the University’s administrative offices. Phillips will work at the GW Center for Undergraduate Fellowships and Research. She encourages students interested in applying for Fulbright or Rhodes fellowships to talk to her. “There is absolutely no reason not to apply,” she says.