All About Girl Guiding in Dubai, and How to Get Involved

Learn more about British Guides in Foreign Countries (BGIFC)

Posted on

31 July 2013

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Editor

British Guides in Foreign Countries (BGIFC) is part of Girlguiding UK, and has been in existence since 1911.

Units are based in many parts of the world, in areas where it is impossible or inappropriate, for reasons such as language or culture, for the girls to join the local national organisation.

Members make the same Promise as in the UK, follow the current programme as appropriate to their Section, and wherever possible follow the policy and rules of Girlguiding UK.

In Dubai and Abu Dhabi, in various locations, we have groups for girls of the following ages: Rainbows age 5-7, Brownies age 7-10, Guides aged 10-14 and Rangers/ Young Leaders aged 14+ and of course we always need adult volunteers to help!

For more information about GirlGuidingUK go to www.girlguiding.org.uk

For information about groups meeting times and places in Dubai please email [email protected] or [email protected]

What do girls in guiding do?

Rainbows- age five to seven
Rainbows have fun! They play games, have parties and make things while developing life skills. Find out about Rainbows.

Brownies- age seven to ten
Brownies do it all! Their meetings are full of challenges, games and activities, usually ones that the Brownies have suggested themselves.

Guides- age 10 to 14
Being a Guide encourages girls to develop by undertaking challenges and pushing the boundaries of their experience.

Ranges/ Young Leaders- age 14+
Rangers. Young Leaders offers an exciting and flexible programme with a huge variety of challenges, activities and opportunities for personal development.

Surprising facts about guiding

Girlguiding UK is the largest youth organisation for girls in the UK today.

More than 14 per cent of six year olds are in Rainbows.

Adult volunteers give on average 120 hours a year.

Girlguiding UK has half a million young members aged four to 25.

One in seven of all six-year-old girls in the UK are Rainbows.

Around a quarter of all eight-year-old girls in the UK are Brownies.

One in ten of all 11-year-old girls in the UK are Guides.

Members today can take part in a wide range of activities from abseiling to party planning and from circus skills to survival.

Girlguiding UK is a founder member of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, the largest youth organisation for girls in the world with more than ten million members in 144 countries.

Celebrity former members include Cat Deeley, Glenda Jackson, Lorraine Kelly, Mo Mowlan, Anita Roddick, Helen Sharman (the first British woman in space), Tanni Grey-Thompson, Zoe Ball, Emma Thompson, Gail Porter, Carole Vorderman, Carol Smillie, Davina McCall and Cherie Booth.

The half a million girls would:

fill 8,333 double-decker buses

fill the Royal Albert Hall 90 times

fill Wembley Stadium five times, Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium seven times and Celtic Park eight times

fill more than 1,200 Boeing 747 jumbo jets

fill 500 25,000-tonne cruise ships.

If all the girls held hands in a straight line, the line would be 850 km long. That would be longer than 8,095 buses parked end to end! They could also stretch around the M25 four and a half times and reach from Bristol to Inverness.

Countries which have smaller populations than our number of members include Barbados, Iceland, the Bahamas, the Maldives, Malta, Luxembourg, Tonga and Equatorial Guinea.