African Women Who Fought for Girls' Education
4 women in the archive worked for girls' education. They came from different countries and different centuries, but each of them saw a wrong that others accepted and set out to change it. Read their stories to see how the same cause looked from very different lives.
4 women in the archive
ContemporaryAgathe Uwilingiyimana
Rwanda's first and only female Prime Minister, a chemistry teacher who abolished ethnic quotas in schools, stood against Hutu Power extremism, and was assassinated with her UN guards in the opening hours of the 1994 genocide.
ContemporaryAngélique Kidjo
Beninese singer who refused to perform propaganda for a dictatorship, fled to Paris in 1983, and became a five-time Grammy winner, UNICEF ambassador, and the first Black African artist honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
ContemporaryGertrude Mongella
Tanzanian stateswoman who served as Secretary-General of the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women, the summit that produced the world's defining gender-equality blueprint, and became the first President of the Pan-African Parliament.
ModernTawhida Ben Cheikh
The first modern female doctor of Tunisia and North Africa, who graduated in Paris in 1936 and spent a century of life opening medicine, family planning, and freedom of choice to Tunisian women.