Briska Shemang

Briska Shemang was born in Nigeria, relocated to Botswana at the age of 13 and is currently completing a master’s degree in Obstetrics and Gynaecology (OBGYN) at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa.  Her father was an academic in Geophysics at the University of Botswana and she left her home in Nigeria to live with him in Botswana where she completed her secondary school education and her degree in medicine. As a young doctor in training she was especially drawn to OBGYN and the social issues that surrounded women’s reproductive health. She saved a portion of her limited salary when she was earning so that she could meet the costs of her master’s degree and funded herself largely from her savings for the first year of the program. Her reviewer recognized that serving as an unpaid volunteer in obstetrics and gynaecology in Botswana for over six months, was an impressive and selfless commitment. Her level of commitment became clear in the interview when she shared with the selection committee that she had been infected with COVID-19 in the early stages of the pandemic while working at the hospital. Nevertheless, upon recovery, she returned to the hospital where she works in an unpaid position as a registrar.

Her professional goal is to make reproductive health care, especially with respect to fertility, more accessible to women in Africa. She makes the point that the availability of fertility treatment for women in communities where fertility carries high social and cultural value, is especially important.

Briska says, “my goal is to establish a reproductive health care center in northern Nigeria which will serve to educate the community on fertility, increase access to good quality services for the poor and provide excellent obstetrics and gynaecological services.”

Hilda Kegode

Hilda Kegode, from Kenya, is currently pursuing her doctorate in Environmental/ Natural Resource Economics at the University of Pretoria.

Hilda’s parents, schoolteachers and subsistence farmers, instilled in her a lifelong appreciation for the value of education. She was successful academically and eager to pursue graduate studies. However, after completing her bachelor’s degree, she had to postpone those dreams to support her ailing mother and help educate younger siblings. Later, after working as a project administrator for CIRAD in Kenya, she obtained a master’s degree in environmental economics, then began working on impact assessment in East and West Africa with World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF). During her seven years there, she became convinced that research must deliberately influence development interventions and that various socio-cultural factors including gender must be included in research design.

Her professional goal is to be an impact evaluation specialist in the areas of natural resource management and rural development, incorporating the views and needs of women. She is committed to using behavioral and experimental economics to better understand how to make interventions on natural resource use more effective, including to both target and empower rural communities in general and women in particular.

Obaa Akua Konadu

Obaa Akua Konadu, from Ghana, is pursuing her doctorate in Business Administration and Management at the University of Stellenbosch Business School. She hails from Ghana’s gold mining region. As a youngster, she observed that young men preferred artisanal mining to education and young women were expected to play traditional roles. That profoundly influenced her career choices and her research interest in women’s engagement in the labor market.

Her PhD thesis examines how women advance their careers in male-dominated professions and the obstacles they face. She hopes to use this research to inform policy and improve working conditions and prospects for women’s upward mobility, in Africa, and the wider Global South. After finishing her PhD, she plans to undertake research and promote policies to help women employed in areas like mining, logistics, and engineering, and expand the roles women can play in these industries. Through her research, she aims to advocate for changing laws and social attitudes regarding sexual harassment and violence against women and girls, as well as equality in pay, participation in decision-making, and sharing of unpaid care and domestic work.

She has built an extensive African and international network through her youth and advocacy volunteer work, including serving as a member of the Generation Equality Youth Task Force, the Global Shapers Community, the Young African Leaders Initiative and the Cowry Network.

Milka Madahana

Milka Madahana, from Kenya, is pursuing her doctorate in Engineering, with Application of Engineering to Medicine, at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her PhD thesis focuses on medical technologies applied to lung function of infants and children. In future, she aims to simplify medical equipment in general and make it more widely available to women and children in rural and disadvantaged populations. She is also eyeing the potential for engineering technology to open new job opportunities for women, including via the use of artificial intelligence in the typically male-dominated field of mining. 

Both in her personal and professional life, Milka has shown a commitment to women and children. She saw early on how women were often at a disadvantage, especially in receiving healthcare. Later, while studying engineering, she noticed enrolled women rarely finished the program. To counter that, she started a mentoring program for young females who were struggling academically, which helped increased retention of female engineers over the years. As a volunteer, she coordinated and fundraised for a care center and built a computer lab for women and children in Johannesburg. 

Milka is one of only a few women in her field of study and specialization and has demonstrated exceptional research productivity: She has published in 13 peer-reviewed journals and alone is responsible for ten percent of the total research output of the University’s School of Electrical Engineering.

Mutsawashe Mutendi

Mutsawashe Mutendi, a South African, is doing a PhD in Medical Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. She is conducting ethnographic research on women’s health in Zimbabwe’s artisanal mining sector.

Mutsawashe observed firsthand the collapse of Zimbabwe’s health infrastructure and resolved to close the gap between the social and medical fields. She realized that the full extent of women’s health issues in the extractive industries had not been professionally researched or understood by key stakeholders, including the women themselves. That knowledge gap resulted in both delayed recognition of their needs for, and limited access to, culturally responsive health services. Her research is expected to directly benefit about 600 women and their children, including those yet unborn, and she aims to reach many more through planned advocacy and policy development work.

Shehani Perera

When Shehani Perera was a young girl, her parents immigrated from Sri Lanka to Malawi, a country she fully adopted as her home. 

She is now pursuing a PhD in Public Health and Human Rights at the University of Cape Town. As a social worker and public health researcher she assisted women and children in fulfilling basic human rights such as to health, dignity, and education. That led her to explore, in her PhD, human rights and HIV testing and counselling services among female patients. This work casts light on a way to abide by medical confidentiality principles while protecting public health interests, specifically assisted partner notification. That is a type of partner notification where a trained provider assists patients in notifying their sex or drug-injecting partners of their positive HIV diagnosis. With their consent, the providers assist the partners with getting tested for HIV and subsequent care. Shehani also works part-time as a Research Fellow on migration, gender, and health systems.

Her career goals are twofold: to continue to be in day-to-day contact with her target population as a social worker, and to have a broad impact through academics and policymaking at the local and international levels. She is particularly keen to help migrant women, informed by her personal experience as an immigrant who saw firsthand the kinds of injustices and social marginalization that often befall women and children.