Along with Mary Louise Cohen and John R. Phillips, Kidjo founded The Batonga Foundation, which empowers some of the most vulnerable and hardest-to-reach young women and girls in Benin with the knowledge and skills they need to be agents of change in their own lives and communities. Batonga accomplishes this by locating the most vulnerable adolescent girls in Benin and connecting them to girl-centered safe spaces led by Beninese women. These safe spaces provide young women and girls with trainings that allow them to gain new skills in financial literacy and build social capital.