Through Her Lens: Cameras For Girls
Digital storytelling sounds simple until you try to compress a life into a few minutes. A digital story is a short film built with a trained facilitator using voiceover, personal images, and careful video editing, but the real work is deciding what matters most. In this conversation, founder Amina Mohamed and host Kristy Wolfe show how a tight format creates clarity, turning a long origin narrative into a piece that feels three-dimensional and emotionally true. For nonprofits, digital storytelling becomes a durable communication tool: it can live on a website, travel on social media, and anchor donor conversations without forcing the founder to repeat the same pitch forever.
Amina’s background drives the heart of Cameras For Girls. Her family arrived in Canada as refugees from Uganda, and years later she returned while making a documentary and met young women shut out of education and opportunity. That experience, paired with a long career in film and television, led her to build a Canadian charity that tackles gender inequality in Africa’s male-dominated media industry. Cameras For Girls teaches photography, ethical storytelling, and business skills, then pairs training with a crucial piece of access: a camera the participants can keep. The goal is not a feel-good workshop, but real pathways into fair paid media jobs in places like Uganda and Tanzania.
Learn more about Cameras For Girls here.
The episode also digs into what ethical storytelling actually requires. Amina rejects extractive “parachute” media models where outsiders gather stories, take the gear home, and control the narrative for their own brand. Instead, she argues for bottom-up development and community-led storytelling: ask people what they need to succeed, build with them, and iterate as needs change. That mindset includes language choices, too, like saying “we work with” rather than “we serve,” and it extends to image selection and consent. Ethical storytelling, in this framing, is a practical discipline that protects dignity and resists recycled colonial narratives.
Episode 56 Key Messages
1:56 Amina’s Path to Founding Cameras For Girls
7:48 Bottom Up vs Top Down
14:01 Editing Choices & Ethical Images
17:16 Where to Share a Founder’s Story
22:24 Ethical Storytelling Against Colonial Narratives
Finally, they unpack the creative process itself: collaboration, editing, and ownership. Even as an experienced editor and filmmaker, Amina is surprised by how a concept changes once it hits a storyboard, and how restraint can make a story land harder. A key test comes from an unlikely critic, her teenage daughter, whose attention and tears confirm the cut. The result becomes a “calling card” that can support funding applications, introduce the founder to donors, and inspire participants to craft their own 90-second story with their own photos and voice. The bigger takeaway is timeless for creators and nonprofits alike: the camera is power, and the most sustainable stories are the ones people can truly own.
About Our Guest
Amina Mohamed is the Founder and Executive Director of Cameras For Girls, a Canadian charity she launched in 2018 to address gender inequality in Africa’s male-dominated media industry.
Connect with Amina here.
About Co-Created
Co-Created is a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of digital storytelling. On each episode, host Kristy Wolfe dives into conversations with the storytellers and facilitators who bring digital stories to life.
If this particular conversation resonated with you, tell a friend or a colleague about Co-Created or share one of the digital stories we were talking about. You can find the stories here.
Co-Created is presented by Common Language DST, digital storytelling facilitation training for health and wellness changemakers and is supported by the team at Snack Labs.
