HPV Future: Providing awareness and access

Promise Anyanwu is a Class of 2024 Millennium Fellow from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. She also was awarded Honorable Mention in the 2025 MCN Stories competition. Promise joined Adrija Das of Team MCN to talk about her experience with the Millennium Fellowship. The interview has been edited for clarity and length by Team MCN.

Adrija, Team MCN: Thank you so much, Promise, for agreeing to meet me and talk with me. Could you first tell me a little bit about yourself? Who is Promise, and why was she interested in social impact? 

Promise: I'm a final year student of health education at the University of Ibadan. And at the heart of my journey, there's this deep passion for health promotion and advocacy. Earlier on, I realized that health challenges in my community often stem from gaps in awareness and access, with people dependent on curative medicine rather than preventive. And this actually led me to initiatives like Health is Diversification, which is a rural health education program that reaches women with vital information on preventive health. And from there, I found new ways to use my voice while serving as the editor-in-chief of both my department press and the Nigerian Red Cross University of Ibadan Detachment, where I began to use media as a powerful tool for health advocacy. My leadership path expanded further when I actually served as the campus director for the Millennium Fellowship, where we united our voices around social impact and health equity. And I appreciate the power of collaboration in driving change.

Currently, my work with the HPV-free future is especially meaningful through cervical cancer awareness and HPV vaccination advocacy. I'm committed to breaking barriers around reproductive health conversations, ensuring that young women and communities are empowered with accurate knowledge that can save lives. And the project has actually reinforced my belief that prevention and education are some of the most powerful tools in public health.

And looking forward, I'm pursuing a product management course alongside my health education background. For me, this is not actually a detour from my original goal, but it's an intentional step to learning to design scalable solutions, manage resources effectively, and apply innovation to complex health challenges, whether it is through outreach, media, or system design. My vision is to build a career that blends both public health, communication and policy consultancy.

Adrija, Team MCN: The work that you're doing is so important. What has the journey been like, what are a few challenges in the arena of social impact itself, how are you overcoming them? 

Promise: Right now, my work focuses on cervical cancer prevention. And so that's actually at the heart of my Millennial Fellowship project, where we talked about cervical cancer, breast cancer, and malaria. I saw that the prevalence of cervical cancer in countries like Nigeria is actually due to systemic ignorance and misconceptions surrounding the HPV vaccination. So many believe that giving their children the vaccine is equal to giving them a free pass to promiscuity.

My aim was to dispel these myths and empower parents and young people to actually make informed decisions. So my journey so far has been both satisfying and deeply challenging, because it has actually stretched me beyond what I thought I was capable of doing. It has made me break down all the walls I surrounded myself with, going outside of my comfort zone as an introvert and putting myself out there.

But I'm deeply satisfied by the fact that each outreach, each awareness, each card that is filled, each vaccine that has been administered, means that one more girl has a fighting chance at life, that communities are now rethinking their stances, and adolescents who might have never had access to these vaccines are now becoming stakeholders in their own health futures, being change makers, propagating and creating a cycle where every other person around them will take their own health into their hands. And in all, this journey has actually been my greatest teacher. It has taught me patience, it has taught me resilience, and it has built an unshakable spirit of hope in me.

Adrija, Team MCN: Thank you so much for sharing, Promise. Let's say, you know, with the work that you're doing with HPV Free Future in your community, say five years from now, what would success look like for you? 

Promise: Okay, with my social impact work, which is HPV Free Future, success to me would be creating a scalable product that would not just be limited to my locality and local governments around me, but something that will cut across states, local governments, where everybody will get to become stakeholders in this work, to create a ripple effect, where even the next adolescents will already have it in the back of their head that this vaccine is actually very important for them and are motivated to go to the primary health centers to get this vaccination.

And I'm actually trying to build a career at the intersection of public health, health advocacy, product, and project management to improve and strengthen the culture of preventive health through HPV Free Future. I'm trying to design people-centered programs, apply design thinking and confront problems directly to make sure that in the next five years, it becomes a scalable enterprise that will cut across Nigeria to other African countries.

Adrija, Team MCN: Thank you so much for sharing that. Coming back to your Millennium Fellowship journey, how did you find out about the program? What inspired you to be part of the fellowship community? 

Promise: I actually first heard about the Millennium Fellowship from an acquaintance's WhatsApp status. So he actually showcased the social impact work that he was doing with his team. And I was intrigued. And it just felt like a light bulb went off in my head. Like, at this point, I already had a deep interest in health advocacy, but I didn't have a clear vision on how to go about it.

And the fellowship seemed like a perfect platform: it offered skills, structure, networks, and even global communities that I needed to fully become my true self. So the journey itself was deeply transformational.

The opportunity to lead over 20 fellows from different cultural, economic, and academic backgrounds stretched me in ways that I never imagined. Many of these fellows were far ahead of me in experience and even in levels. And yet they'd come to me, look for me for direction, ask questions, and all that. It was deeply humbling for me to be in that position.

I had to learn that I was not here because I was better than them. It was just an opportunity for me to serve. It was my very first leadership role and since then, it has opened doors to many other leadership roles. Even now, as a study group leader in my product management track, I chased my shift in orientation back to that particular moment. The realization that I should always seek opportunities to serve and get involved, rather than just sit on the sidelines like I was used to.

Some of the most valuable lessons I learned were first that solutions must be built with the communities and not for the communities. That when people become stakeholders rather than spectators, the impact is lasting. And second is that leadership is not just about titles or being the “head,” - it's about service, making people feel that they are safe, and creating an environment where other people can thrive. And the lectures, the peer network, further shaped my perception of life and my social impact. These lessons continue to guide me today in my work with HPV Free Future, and is how I envision my career at the intersection of public health, social impact, and product management.

The fellowship seemed like a perfect platform: it offered skills, structure, networks, and even global communities that I needed to fully become my true self...the Millennium Fellowship helped me realize that I'm not to present myself as a savior to [the community], but as someone that is trying to work together with them to create solutions that they actually need.

Adrija, Team MCN: That is so powerful to learn, and I'm so glad that was a fellowship experience for you. Is there one value that you learned during the fellowship that you carry on till this day? 

Promise: It's not just one value, so I'm just trying to pick one out of the many values.

But like I said earlier, it actually shaped the way I went about my social impact work because ordinarily we want to go into the community as saviors, trying to save them from impending doom. But the Millennium Fellowship helped me realize that I'm not to present myself as a savior to them, but as someone that is trying to work together with them to create solutions that they actually need. The Millennium Fellowship helped me to go into the community, look for the community's pain points, something that they actually appreciate and something that they actually need to be solved with them. The different case scenarios that were in the lectures and the slides, where instead of going to the community to give them money, they were able to create scalable initiatives that put it in their own hands, where they had to work to become stakeholders.

So stories like this shaped the way I go about my social impact work. 

Adrija, Team MCN: Amazing. If there was one advice you would want to give the upcoming classes of the Millennium Fellowship program, what would that be? 

Promise: Make the most out of the opportunity. As the campus director, I had the opportunity to be up and center and to see a lot of my fellows. I saw different people, both the ones that came in with A-games, willing to serve. I saw the ones that just came to get the certificate. They're the ones that felt like the fellowship was going to offer them some sort of grant and they're just here for the money. But I feel like they should define their why.

Why are they here? What do they hope to get out of the fellowship? And they should walk towards it. The fellowship is a platform that, when used judiciously, will reap ripple benefits in their future lives and careers, their professional lives. So if they maximize and make the best of it, it will actually show in every single thing that they do later on in life.

So I would advise them to, first off, to know their whys and to let that why direct them in their four months’ journey in the fellowship. 

Adrija, Team MCN: That is a very important advice to take home.To the wider audience who would be reading this blog, Promise, is there something about the work that you're doing you would like for them to know, any pointed advice for people who want to work in the space of reproductive health and preventive medicine? 

Promise: So one thing I would want the fellowship to know is the fact that, unlike other types of cancers, cervical cancer can be, to a large extent, prevented as we have been able to trace  a particular variant of HPV to be one of the leading causes of cervical cancer along with other risk factors. So now that we have this in our hands, I want us to actually leverage it. So many developed and developing countries have actually adopted this and taken this seriously, but countries like Nigeria and other African countries have sort of developed a misconception around it, which is preventing us from going ahead and having a scalable vaccination drive.

So I want people around us to actually take it into our own hands to, as much as possible, educate people around us, because it's collective work. It's a collective journey and we all need to take action around it, because one less person needs to suffer from this, one less family needs to go through the burden and despair of cervical cancer. So I want us to educate people around us, make sure that each girl has been vaccinated against the HPV vaccine, and we thank God that here in Nigeria the vaccine is actually free and readily available, but these same misconceptions and myths still serve as a barrier to them taking it. So I just want us to be change agents and propagators of this information to those around us, especially those in rural communities where this information is not readily available to them. Thank you.