Women as Changemakers
Most Recent:Women as Changemakers
Tjada D’Oyen McKenna is the first woman — and Black — to head the international charity Mercy Corps, an organization based in the United States that she has led since 2020. She has moved in and out of the public …
- Damilola Banjo
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Taina Bien-Aimé started speaking up for women’s rights when she was still a teenager. A daughter of two Haitians who had met and settled in New York City, she was only about 15, some childhood friends recently reminded her, when …
- Damilola Banjo
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Beatrice Fihn, a 40-year-old Swede, grew up wanting to make a big difference in humanity, but she did not know how she could do that. First, she thought she would “stitch people up” after they suffered an accident or make …
- Damilola Banjo
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- Dawn Clancy
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Nations of the world have taken giant steps in recent decades to build international structures and strengthen institutions to deal with mass human-rights abusers. At almost every stage, Navi Pillay, a South African lawyer, was there, advancing the rights of …
When she was only 10 years old, Gertrude Oforiwa Fefoame realized that she could no longer read her classroom’s blackboard at her school in eastern Ghana. She eventually learned that she had retinal dystrophy, an irreversible degenerative condition that would …
- Damilola Banjo
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Rebeca Grynspan, the first woman and first Latin American to lead the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, has a lot of work to do. The organization, founded in 1964 as a standing committee, now has 195 member nations. …
It was the death in childbirth of a dear friend that spurred Adepeju Jaiyeoba, then a young lawyer in Lagos, Nigeria, to take action. It was 2011, and 978 out of every 100,000 Nigerian women — 40,000 a year — …
- Damilola Banjo
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For Natalia Kanem, the executive director of the United Nations Population Fund since 2017, the last couple of years have been a wild ride. In 2020, women the world over were getting ready to celebrate important anniversaries: 25 years since …
Naoko Yamazaki made space history not only as the second woman astronaut from Japan, but also by participating in the record-setting 2010 NASA space shuttle mission STS-131 to the International Space Station, or ISS. Launched from the Kennedy Space Center …
- Elizabeth Colton
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