Fighting for Girls' Rights
By Susan Macaulay
Betty Makoni was beaten and raped as a child. When she was nine, she saw her father kill her mother.
But she is not a victim. She is a survivor, activist and leader who turned her devastating childhood experiences into a force for good in her native country Zimbabwe.
In 1998, Makoni founded Girl Child Network (GCN) , a Zimbabwean girls’ rights organization that now has approximately 30,000 members across the country.
She received the World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of Children in 2007, and Amnesty International’s Ginetta Sagan Award for Women’s and Children’s Rights in 2008.
Betty Makoni was beaten and raped as a child. When she was nine, she saw her father kill her mother.
But she is not a victim. She is a survivor, activist and leader who turned her devastating childhood experiences into a force for good in her native country Zimbabwe.
In 1998, Makoni founded Girl Child Network (GCN) , a Zimbabwean girls’ rights organization that now has approximately 30,000 members across the country.
She received the World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of Children in 2007, and Amnesty International’s Ginetta Sagan Award for Women’s and Children’s Rights in 2008.
Zoe Vowles, a British midwife working in remote Sierra Leone, has just been shortlisted for Cosmopolitan's Ultimate Women of the Year awards.
Susan notes (October 16, 2010): I've just made my annual Breast Cancer Awareness Month visit to Lisa Norman's blog to find that she is still cancer free after two and half years. She's finished with Tamoxifen and is onto a three-year course of Anasrozole, she's had more reconstructive surgery and posted some amazing photographs of the resulting bruises. Brava Lisa!