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For Shakira Nynagoma, the kindness of strangers has played an invaluable role in life. Shakira lost her mother at an early age. After her mother’s demise, Shakira’s father was unable to pay for her schooling, but this did not stop her from continuing her education. After graduating from high school Shakira applied to the MasterCard Foundation Scholarship to obtain funding for her academic future. Now she, along with 9 other University of Makerere students have started the Skyward Alliance Trust (SAT) to help other struggling students and give back to their community. “I was being helped by the MasterCard Foundation right up from high school. I am now living a good life and I am studying. I want to do the same for other people because sometimes when you don’t have a helper you can fail to achieve your dreams.” The Skyward Alliance Trust (SAT) is a project that aims to reduce the number of students that drop out of school due to monetary problems. SAT lends money to struggling students and allows them to pay back the loan at their own pace with an affordable level of interest charged. The interest money is then used to fund even more students. SAT also provides students with business opportunities to earn their own money and to pay for their education. SAT currently helps around 60 students in the Makerere community. The major goals of SAT are to, eliminate the number of students dropping out of school for financial reasons, educate the youth on the UN Sustainable Development Goals particularly quality education, and to create a sustainable system by which youth can pursue or create employment opportunities to fund their education. In order to take her project to the next level, Shakira decided to join the Millennium Fellowship. She joined the Fellowship to meet fellow young people who are passionate about helping their communities and to better learn how to run her project. According to Shakira, the most valuable part of the Fellowship so far are the lessons that she has learned from it. “I have been able to learn how to work in a team to achieve goals. I’ve been able to learn how to distribute tasks, how to listen to other people’s ideas, and how to grow together.” Shakira continually emphasizes that the kindness of the people at the MasterCard Foundation is what got her so far in life and is the reason why she is passionate about giving back to her community. “I was being helped by people I didn’t even know. They are not my parents and I’ve never seen them before. It is through this, that I developed the passion to help other people in my community so they can reach the same (university) level that I am at.” Shakira hopes that with the help of the Millennium Fellowship she will be able to take her project, the Skyward Alliance Trust to the next level. Her organization hopes to start more projects to provide self-employment and to extend the project to other communities to help more people.

In 2016, Odaly S. Balasquide Odeh came to a crushing realisation in the happiest place on Earth – Disney Land. Like many other visitors, Odaly got to watch the celebrated fireworks show at Disney Land. However, instead of being fascinated by their beauty and grandeur, the fireworks made her sad because of the smoke and contamination that they were putting out into the atmosphere. When she started university, Odaly ran her reflection past her honours professor and decided to focus on atmospheric pollution as a research thesis topic. In order to figure out how to meet the needs of her community, Odaly met up with local news reporters in Puerto Rico and identified specific topics within air pollution that were affecting her country and her people. Together, they identified the topic of the disposal and re-use of coal combustion waste. “The thing that made me really focus on this project was the urgency I felt after the storm. It was something I needed to experience.” Around one year later on September 20, 2017, Puerto Rico was hit by Hurricane Maria. Hurricane Maria pushed the 3.4 million residents of Puerto Rico into a humanitarian crisis. The powerful category 4 hurricane destroyed homes, limited access to running water, and cut electricity on the island. For many Puerto-Ricans, Hurricane Maria demonstrated the dangerous effects of climate change. For Odaly, it was a tipping point. She realised that her research into coal combustion waste and the effect that it plays on climate change was critical. After Hurricane Maria, Odaly began focusing on her research with renewed vigour and specialised her project even more. She is currently researching how the ashes from coal combustion are being discarded and repurposed. She explained that the disposal or repurposing of these ashes are not sufficiently regulated in Puerto Rico and therefore can cause serious harm to the environment and the health of communities. She went on to explain that there have been many environmental and health problems arising in the areas where these ashes have been discarded or used, which might indicate a dangerous correlation. She has also been focusing on increasing education in the topic of coal combustion ash by-product and educating local populations on understanding the needs of the environment. “After the storms we started experiencing, the passion for the project and the excitement to do something got even stronger and that was one of the reasons why I applied to the Millennium Fellowship. I stopped thinking I will have enough time after I graduate to work on this. I started thinking, I need to start on this and I can’t wait on this any longer. The planet needs us now.” ! Her enthusiasm for her project eventually led her to apply to the 2019 Millennium Fellowship. Through the Fellowship she has connected to students from all around the world and hopes to come together with them to fight climate change and its effects together. The Millennium Fellowship currently has 40+ students working on climate action and change initiatives globally. Odaly sincerely believes that the world waits for no one. She thinks that if you have a good idea, you need to go out and implement it as soon as possible even if you do not have all the qualifications. When she first started this project, she faced a lot of doubts because she was a student researcher. However, she has persevered and has kept going because she knows that her research is making a difference. She says, “I think the focus should be on not limiting yourself. It's not about having the overall professional experience, its about learning through process and the experience. It is important that we start doing things now.” Odaly hopes that when she leaves her university she will have left a legacy for other students to build on her research in atmospheric pollution and in climate change research. She also hopes to have inspired others to look for the tools around them and not limit themselves to change their communities.

In Zimbabwe, many cannot afford the first building block of education – pre-school. Zimbabwe has a unique law which mandates that all students must attend two years of Early Childhood Development (ECD) pre-primary education before they can be enrolled in primary schools. Due to this law, the cost of pre-schools and ECD programs have gone up, forcing some families to pay fees that they cannot afford or enroll their children in unregistered, residential pre-schools. Shantel Marekera was once one of these children. Her grandmother struggled to pay steep pre-school fees while her mother attended university. Drawing from her own personal experience, Shantel started the Little Dreamers Foundation with the intention of providing access to affordable and quality pre-school education for vulnerable children in her community. In 2018 she became a Millennium Fellow and was able to take her social impact to the next level. Shantel has implemented several lessons that the Fellowship exposed her to in order to launch the Little Dreamers Foundation. One of the most notable lessons that she utilised was the skills mapping exercise which was integral to her fundraising strategy for her Foundation. She also reflected on how the Fellowship helped her to realise that in order to launch a successful venture she had to meet her community and develop trusting partnerships with them. “Even though I grew up in Zimbabwe and I identify with the problems that the kids are going through, I had been away for 4 years (in college), which created a gap between me and my community. I needed to recognise that I still have things I do not know and ask my community how best to fulfil its needs.” Shantel used the launch of her Foundation as a point of entry to communicate with her community and understand their needs. Not only did the lessons from the Millennium Fellowship help her to launch her organisation but the sense of community that the Fellowship and her university cohort provided also helped her to brainstorm ideas and feel supported. “It was a tight community and anyone could ask for help with anything. The strength that comes from having a community that understands where you are at any particular time was really important for me.” Since leaving the Fellowship, Shantel has passed many important milestones. Not only did she successfully launch her Foundation, but also, she is currently working on creating another branch of the Foundation in a neighbouring community, Budiriro. This new branch is expected to launch in January 2020. She has also bought a mini-bus that will aid in transporting her students to and from the pre-school.  She envisions a bright future for the Little Dreamers Foundation and would eventually like to secure land to build a huge school which includes a pre-school, elementary school, and high school.

Not everyone is born with the right to an education. “For me, my passion was born out of pain” -Tolani Odukoya Tolani Odukoya grew up in Lagos, Nigeria in a low-income community. Since his mother could not fund his education, he had to create his own opportunities. In high school, he started working at a local car-wash in order to put himself through secondary school and support his mother financially. Despite spending a significant amount of time earning money to support himself and his mother, Tolani excelled academically and was extremely intelligent. His school-teacher recognized his talent and supported him to go to university. Having gotten the opportunity to get an education, Tolani founded The Mindset Initiative in order to increase access to education in low-income communities like his own. He explained that in the current educational system, most students pass through school and end up with no tangible skills that can be applied to solve real-world problems. His organisation endeavours to fix this problem by training children between the ages of 12 to 16 on relevant 21st-century skills that prepare them for future employment while also empowering vulnerable girls and women. These children are taught a variety of skills including leadership, critical thinking, entrepreneurship, and design via what Tolani calls integrated education. In an increasingly digital world, Tolani has leveraged on teaching technology and innovation concepts and has placed a special focus on computer skills including programming and coding. He shared the story of a 13-year-old girl in the Makoko community in Lagos. The entire livelihood of the Makoko community depends on fishing. In fact, most of the children in this community do not go to school. Rather, they learn how to fish. However, this 13-year-old girl from Makoko was able to develop a mobile app that better-connected fishermen to buyers at a fair price, thereby aiding the economy of her community. Tolani said, 'if this young girl could develop such an innovative invention to meet a need in her community using creativity and technology then any child can too, provided they are exposed and empowered with the necessary skills.” Tolani credits the success of his organisation in no small part to his Millennium Fellowship experience. The Fellowship taught him how to transition his vision to action and exposed him to the relevance and the needs of his community. It also taught him how to become a leader in his community and how to channel his passion productively. He explained that his experience at the Millennium Fellowship taught him the concept of “servant leadership” and how essential it is to be a “servant leader” to thrive and positively impact the lives of others in any organisation. “I was passionate as an individual but didn’t know how to lead. Once I became a Fellow, I was able to connect with the content of the Fellowship.” Since leaving the Fellowship Tolani has not only managed to become a leader and launch his educational non-profit but he has also been able to strategize about the future. He hopes that his organisation will one day be a part of the government and that integrated education will be the norm in Nigeria and in Africa at large. He also hopes to continue raising money for his organisation through crowd-funding and grants.