“You can be anything you want to be.”
Many girls hear this as they grow up. It is encouraging, but encouragement alone is not always enough.
For a teenage girl thinking about her future, knowing that possibilities exist and seeing them up close are two different things. And that is why exposure matters.
Possibility Becomes Real When She Can See It
A girl may be told she can become a doctor, engineer, entrepreneur, lawyer, or designer. But how does she know what those paths actually look like?
Exposure lets her learn from people, ask questions, and discover options she had never considered. Meeting someone in an unfamiliar field gives her a clearer picture of the work. Hearing someone’s journey shows her that careers are rarely a straight line.
This is the thinking behind Project LEAD. At its first conference in October 2020, “Dear Teenage Self,” speakers including Vera Kamtukule and Glowreeyah Braimah, among other women, spoke to teenage girls about the careers they built, the lessons that cost them something, and what they wish they had known sooner. In 2020, women looked back and shared what they had learned.
This year, women including Barong Asiodu, General Manager of Corporate Planning and Strategy at Rite Foods Limited, and Ifeoma Finnih, founder of CIF Consulting, will speak to girls who are looking ahead to the futures they want to build.
The conversation has moved from “what I wish I had known” to “here is what is possible,” but Project LEAD’s purpose stays the same: to give girls room to think about the lives they want and the people they want to become.
Exposure Changes How She Understands Work
Many young people grow up with narrow ideas of what a successful career looks like. Medicine, engineering, and law get most of the attention, while fields like marine biology, marketing, or vocational careers stay out of view.
Exposure widens that picture. It also reminds her that every form of honest work has value, whatever the job title or income.
Seeing this early helps her ask better questions: “What am I good at? What problems do I want to solve? What kind of work would I find meaningful?”
From Exposure to Choice
Exposure does not decide for a girl. It gives her the information to decide for herself.
This is why this year’s theme, “Her Choice, Her Future, Her Legacy: Empowering Girls to Dream, Lead and Build a Legacy of Excellence,” begins with choice.
A girl can only dream about what she knows exists. She can only lead where she has seen leadership. And she can only build a legacy if someone has shown her that she has the power to start.
From Choice to Legacy
Every conversation, mentor, and new experience adds to the choices a girl makes. Over time, those choices become her future. What she builds, who she lifts, and the example she sets become her legacy.
It often starts with one conversation, one person, or one experience that shows her a door she did not know was there.
Her Choice. Her Future. Her Legacy.
So the question is not just whether girls know they can be anything. It is this:
“Do they have the chance to see, explore, and understand enough of what is possible to choose the futures and the legacies they want to build?”
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