Babita Patel, Founder of KIOO Project

For my next interview in the Tiny CEO series, I spoke with Babita Patel, founder and executive director of KIOO Project, an organization that teaches “picture equality” all around the world.

What is the KIOO Project?

The KIOO Project is a nonprofit that works on gender equality by teaching photography to girls, and then the girls teach boys. We run our program all over the world to give girls leadership opportunities and presentation skills, while boys see the girls in an elevated leadership role. We run the program in multiple countries, including Haiti, Kenya, India, Ethiopia, Uganda, Nepal, and the United States.

What photography techniques do you teach the girls?

We teach them techniques like rule of thirds, composition, and framing, and we introduce self-portraits and how to create them. We also train their schools to continue the program when we leave. In the assignments that we leave for the school to teach the girls, they teach things like leading lines, framing a frame within a frame, symmetry, and other photography techniques.

What is your favorite part of your job?

Spending time with the girls, being with them in their home country, and learning what excites them. Seeing the smiles on their faces when they realize they take a really beautiful photograph, or when they discover that they're beautiful and powerful through the self-portrait assignment. Just watching them blossom as leaders when they are in charge of teaching the boys. The two weeks I spend with them is always the best part of my year.

What is one of your workshops like?

The first week, the KIOO team teaches the girls a different photography assignment every day. We wrap each technique around a different conversation about gender roles in their community, what it means to be a girl, and all the different identities that she might have. The second week, the girls teach the boys photography, and the girls are completely in charge of the workshop. The girls get to decide on the assignment, what part of the assignment they teach, which boy they get to teach that day. Then we do a gallery show in their school or library, and we print out all their favorite photographs that they took during the week. We display the photographs, and the kids and their families come. The villagers that we've been photographing all week are invited, as well as school and community leaders. It becomes a big party!

Is there a favorite assignment that you've taught girls?

My favorite assignment is always a self-portrait. It's not a “selfie”, which we're so used to taking with our phones; it is a self-portrait where you put the camera somewhere, set up a timer, and jump in front of the lens. You show something that you want to say about yourself, your personality, your favorite things, how you see yourself. Usually it's during that assignment that girls discover that they're powerful and beautiful.

Do you have a favorite photograph that someone from KIOO took?

In a village in Ethiopia, one of the girls was photographing a friend of hers against a really pretty turquoise blue wall. There were some other girls watching, and one boy was standing on the outside of the group. I thought, “This is a great moment for my student to learn how to photograph two people at the same time.” But I couldn't say that in Amharic, and I didn’t have a translator. So I just dragged the boy over and made him stand next to the girl being photographed. Using sign language, I told my student to finish photographing the girl and the boy together. The second I forced the boy to stand next to the girl, all the girls started laughing and giggling. 

It was the coolest photoshoot I've ever seen. The two of them just played off of each other, against this really pretty wall. It was just beautiful. We went back into the classroom to talk about what we had photographed that day; by this point, the translator was there. My student pointed to one of the pictures that she took of the girl and the boy together, and she said that it was the first time she's seen a girl stand next to a boy. Because in Ethiopian culture, they don't. The boys always went first, and the girls always followed. She always thought that meant that girls were less than boys.

Through this photograph, she saw that it's possible for a girl to stand next to a boy. The sky doesn't fall down, and the world doesn't blow up. Through a photograph she took herself, she realized that it's possible for a girl to stand next to a boy as his equal.

Photo Credit: Tesfanesh T., KIOO Project Ethiopia

What advice would you give any woman entrepreneurs looking to start a business?

Just do it. Women and girls often think that we need to know everything and everything needs to be perfect before we do something. But we will never know everything. I didn't know everything that it took to start a nonprofit. If I had known, I probably wouldn’t have done it. It's just one of those things where once you take the first step, the next step happens, and then the next step happens, and you learn as you go. You will never have all the money in the world, all the resources in the world, all the knowledge in the world to start something. So if you want to do it, you have an idea, and you think that the world needs what you're putting out there, just do it. Don't think that you don't have the ability—because you do.

Bonus Question: What is the first stamp in your passport?

I love that question. At the time of my birth, my family lived in Zambia because my father worked there. But my mother, in her infinite wisdom, thought that it would be better if I had a British birthright instead of a Zambian one, so she went back to England to have me. But I was two weeks late; I was very happy to be with my mother and didn't want to come out! Since my mother had already booked her ticket back to Zambia, one day she just walked to the hospital and induced me. The doctor got me out because my mother had to get on a plane! I was only three days old when I traveled from England to Zambia. My first passport picture actually has my mother's hand in it because she's holding me up. I'm a newborn in that picture, at about 3 days old. That’s the first stamp in my passport.