With the increase of poverty in Uganda, single parents, especially women, struggle to make ends meet. You’ll often find women facing more hardship as men abandon their families, leaving them to support themselves and their children with very little. To make matters worse, some girls are forced into child marriage which perpetuates the same poverty cycle. At the age of two, our founder and CEO Desange Kuenihira and her six siblings moved to a refugee camp in Uganda. In that camp, they had to fight for the lives they wanted. Desange’s only potential worth was the dowry a much older man would pay to marry her as a pre-teen. Repeatedly, her friends were taken and forced to marry strangers, have their children, and essentially serve as their slaves. Typically, the marriages wouldn’t last long, and soon the women returned to parents with children, a ruined reputation, and no options for their futures. She was one of the lucky ones. Desange was given an opportunity to have a different future when she came to the United States. But the girls left behind were and are always in her heart and on her mind. She founded unDEfeated for her friends and the countless young women in Uganda who don’t have someone valuing their worth.