
Payton McGriff was facing her last college year at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho 2017. A budding entrepreneur, she decided to start SHE, Style Her Empowered, as a class project to teach young girls how to sew so they could get an education….in Togo, Africa, over 7,000 miles away. She began with 65 girls and two seamstresses.
I was struck by how hard girls are working to overcome the multitude of barriers they face in gaining their education, and yet still, girls in rural Togo spend an average of just 2 – 3 years in school. Payton McGriff
Flash forward: SHE is now an international organization serving 2,000 girls annually and employing 33 amazing women across 21 rural communities in Togo sustainable factories. You can also vote for Payton as 2024 CNN Hero of the Year to be announced December 8, 8PM ET here. Good luck, Payton!
When I saw this 2024 CNN Hero’s short story, I had to find to find out how, when, where, why this came about and found some impactful answers from this remarkable young woman. Where there’s determination, there are changemakers like Payton.
EYE: How did a young woman in Idaho find out about the obstacles female students face in Togo, Africa?
PAYTON MCGRIFF: I first learned about the barriers girls and women face globally in the book, Half the Sky. More than 100 million girls around the world are not in school, and that in many countries the cost of a required school uniform is one of the largest financial barriers to education. However, providing school uniforms can be one of the most cost-effective ways to help girls stay in school.
EYE: And that triggered an idea for you, as well as an adventure?
PAYTON: Yes. In 2017, during my senior year of college at the University of Idaho, I took an entrepreneurship class to see if there was a way to create a nonprofit business model centered around providing school uniforms for girls. During this class, I met Dr. Romuald (Ro) Afatchao, a professor in the International Studies program who was originally from Togo, Africa.
Ro liked the idea and thought it might be a good fit in his home town of Notsé, Togo. He offered to partner with me to start this project, on one condition – I had to travel to Togo first to meet with local community members and ensure it was a good fit for them. About 11 days after I met Ro for the first time, I was in Togo researching the barriers standing between girls and their education.

EYE: What struck you when you first went to Togo, Africa?
PAYTON: I was so inspired by the resilience and ambition of the girls I met. Elolo, then 15 years old, had dreams of becoming a nurse to help families like hers have access to health care. I asked Elolo if I could spend a full day with her to better understand what a ‘day in the life’ of a girl in Togo felt like. We woke up at 3:30 a.m. to start preparing the rice that her mother sells to support the family.
We then walked to the farm to collect corn, fetched water from the local well, cooked breakfast for her brothers, washed dishes, and cleaned the area around the outdoor kitchen – all before Elolo started getting ready to go to school.
When she returned home from school, we did it all again until the sun went down. Because her house did not have electricity, Elolo made her way to the closest streetlight to do her schoolwork.
EYE: Is this when you decided to start your foundation?
PAYTON: Elolo’s story is what inspired me to start SHE. Her parents had recently pulled her out of school so her brothers could stay in school and Elolo could help the family earn money.
EYE: How did you get it all going?
PAYTON: When I returned to my university, I began competing in entrepreneurship competitions across the Pacific Northwest. As a nonprofit, I wasn’t expecting to do very well in these competitions, but to my surprise, I ended up winning all three of the competitions I entered and secured about $35,000 in seed funding to launch SHE in Togo.
A couple of weeks before graduation, I turned down the job I had been interviewing for and booked my flight back to Togo to open our program in the summer of 2017.
EYE: What made you think that teaching the young women to sew their own uniforms would be a solution?
PAYTON: I initially thought that in teaching girls to sew their own school uniforms they would be able to have the uniform they needed to attend school and gain an income-generating skill along the way.
EYE: Were there hurdles?

PAYTON: After spending a day with Elolo, I quickly realized that because girls are expected to do all of the household chores, they are not afforded any extra minutes in the day to learn a new skill. That’s when we hired two local seamstresses to begin sewing our school uniforms the first year.
When our seamstresses received their first paychecks, I watched them draw a circle because they had never been taught how to write their own names.
It was then that I realized that seamstresses in Togo represent another large group of young women who are currently underserved. In fact, most young women who become seamstresses in Togo didn’t have the opportunity to attend school as children.
We quickly expanded our mission to include women’s employment, creating our Paid-to-Learn employment model to equip women with stable employment and adult learning opportunities they deserve in order to thrive.
EYE: Are you a seamstress or designer?
PAYTON: I wouldn’t call myself a seamstress or a designer because I’ve never had any formal training, but I’ve always enjoyed sewing and I studied architecture in my undergrad. So design is one of my greatest passions. I made some of my own clothes when I was younger, so I’ve always had a deep interest in sewing and clothing.

EYE: What surprised you in introducing this idea?
PAYTON: A lot. I was 22 and a student in college when I started SHE. I had so much to learn, and so much to unlearn, about building a grassroots organization that empowers local girls and women to be at the center of their own development. The first major surprise was that the initial model of teaching girls to sew their own school uniforms simply wasn’t going to work.
The next major surprise was watching our students outgrow their uniforms so quickly during the school year. I’m sure this would not have been a surprise to every parent on the planet, but I was not anticipating how quickly our girls would outgrow their uniforms. Fortunately, this became the inspiration for our SHE uniforms that grow.
EYE: What were you not prepared for?
PAYTON: I think I was not prepared for how much of a professional and personal journey entrepreneurship is. When going through entrepreneurship classes, you talk a lot about finding product market fit or scaling a business, but you don’t often talk about how to be a leader or how to create a company culture that empowers others to lead too.
I’ve learned more than I could have ever imagined on this journey, and I’m incredibly grateful for the team we have at SHE because it feels like we’re all on this journey of discovering how we want to show up in this world, together.
EYE: Do you have a favorite success story?
PAYTON: We have so many incredible students and seamstresses who inspire all of us. Elolo is so inspiring because she was the first girl sponsored by SHE in 2017. Today, she’s the first high school graduate in her family, and she is now the Assistant Director of SHE Togo, so she’s helping thousands of girls across Togo attend school and has become such a role model for our students. Another incredible story is Sefako.

She joined our program at the age of 13, but by the age of 15, her father no longer supported her going to school. He gave her the ultimatum of either getting married to the man he had arranged a marriage with, or she had to leave the family home. Sefako made the courageous decision to continue her education in Notsé, and she supported herself through school with small jobs and internships at SHE.
She graduated top of her class in sciences, and she is currently working full-time as a SHE Program Coordinator to save money for university where she hopes to study agricultural sciences.
EYE: What has been the key to the sustainability of SHE?
PAYTON: Our local team in Togo has been the absolute key to our success. six of our seven top leadership positions are held by Togolese women. Global Partnerships Director Fawzi and our Executive Director, Françoise, who is a Togolese woman and based in our Notsé office, are great. Francoise has done an incredible job building trust and partnership with the 21 village communities we currently serve.
Initially, our village partners were skeptical because nonprofits had come through their communities and left a wake of unfulfilled promises. However, after five years of sustained partnership with all of our villages, our team has built a really beautiful example of collaboration and partnership with the communities we serve.
Today, our village leaders work very closely with our team to develop programs that serve their specific needs. A lot of my own work today focuses around fundraising, marketing programs and developing partnerships. Our motto is when girls and women rise, we all rise.
EYE: What is your goal with SHE?
PAYTON: Our goal has always been to build a self-sustaining model that simultaneously uplifts girls and women and can be replicated in communities around the world. We are continuing to grow our programs in Togo and to explore additional communities around the world where we might be able to create more jobs for women and education opportunities for girls.
There are 129 million girls not in school today, so we always say that until every girl and woman can thrive, SHE will persist.
EYE: What has being an entrepreneur taught you?.
PAYTON: At its simplest, I think entrepreneurship is a willingness to more deeply understand a problem and do something to solve it. Everyone can be an entrepreneur in their own way, and it’s this accessibility and inclusivity that makes entrepreneurship special, in my opinion. In that regard, I think entrepreneurship and service are extremely similar.
EYE: What has been your biggest challenge?
PAYTON: It’s taken me a long time to develop confidence as an entrepreneur. Being such a young first-time founder, there was a lot of self-doubt and feelings of “not enough” in the early years of SHE. For a long time, I didn’t even consider myself an entrepreneur, but through a lot of self-work, I’ve learned to understand and embrace the parts that show up in moments of uncertainty.

and Francoise (r), Exec Director SHE.
EYE: You said you’ve had several mentors. What have they taught you?
PAYTON: Curiosity is the greatest skill you can develop as a leader. My best mentors are not people who have all the answers; they are the people who ask me the most questions. It’s the greatest gift my mentors have given to me, and it’s a quality I try to embody for our team too.
Curiosity has created a culture of learning and creativity, and it is something you can literally feel when you walk in the doors at SHE. It’s so special.
EYE: What do you ultimately want to achieve with SHE?
PAYTON: We want to continue growing our earned revenue to support and sustain the growth of our mission around the world. Right now, that looks like leveraging our specialties by making and selling school uniforms with 100% of proceeds funding our mission.
In the future, we aim to be entirely sustained by our earned revenue and serving millions of girls and women around the world.
EYE: What are you in need of most to keep your SHE sustainable?
PAYTON: We need continued partnership with people who believe in the vision we’re building. More specifically, we are looking for more schools to partner with SHE as their school uniform provider; businesses in the US who would like SHE to manufacture their soft goods; and funding partners who share our vision for a nonprofit social enterprise model that uplifts girls and women.

EYE: What are your next steps for your own future?
PAYTON: Continuing to serve SHE in whatever capacity the organization needs me. I truly love my job so much, and I am so grateful for the personal and professional growth it has afforded me. And we are just getting started.
EYE: Payton, you are truly remarkable and impressive. Continued success as you grow with SHE and all the people involved!
Photos: Courtesy SHE
Social Media for Payton McGriff and SHE:
Website: Style Her Empowered
Instagram: @styleherempowered
LinkedIn: Style Her Empowered (SHE) | LinkedIn
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