Santa Clarita PhD student Zuriel Oduwole, 21, was presented with the Forbes Woman Africa Award 2024 a day after leading a panel of leaders at a conference in Johannesburg, South Africa for female executives. The event included a footfall federation CEO, a basketball conference executive, capital market icons and leading attorneys as part of International Women’s Day.

To Oduwole, the award itself presented to eleven women in different categories and chosen from millions of eligible recipients of which she was one, was only part of the story.

The true award for her, was standing on the same stage to receive her recognition with a women whom she has admired from a distance for over a decade since the age of 10. She is Graca Machel, the widow of Nelson Mandela, and co-founder of “The Elders” forum, a global peace advocacy, whose original members included four Nobel peace prize winners Archbishop Desmond Tutu, President Jimmy Carter, Secretary General Kofi Annan and Mandela himself.

At age 80, Machel was receiving the Forbes Lifetime achievement award for her gender equity and advocacy work that began 50 years ago in 1975.

For her part, Oduwole’s work in helping end girl marriage in Mozambique in 2019 after meeting the country’s president a year earlier, her film making class for older girls that has now extended across seven countries on two continents, her ability to meet personally with 35 presidents and prime ministers over a decade period to discuss critical global development issues, and more recently, her peace mediation initiative between nations on the brink of conflict, were all singled out in the citation read before her award presentation.

Through her walk and her development projects, she continues to be the epitome and a powerful ‘Ambassador by Example’, of why impediments should be removed to allow all girls across the globe to go to school till at least the age of 18, so they have more options for their future besides an early marriage, a subsistence living, or dependence based journey in life.