I’m a Refugee Woman. I’ve Seen the Power of Girls’ Education.

Last month, as world leaders gathered in New York for the UN General Assembly, I stepped onto a stage  at the Concordia Summit in Times Square to help launch the USA for UNHCR’s Building Better Futures campaign, a women-led initiative created to expand access to higher education for refugee women. It aims to raise $15 million by the end of 2028 to support 1,000 female refugee scholars through the DAFI scholarship program — the largest and longest-running higher education scholarship program for refugees globally. I was joined on the panel by several extraordinary women: USA for UNHCR CEO Suzanne Ehlers, filmmaker and philanthropist Jessica de Rothschild, and award-winning journalist Ann Curry. It was a powerful moment of women coming together to advocate for women around the world. 

As I sat in stillness on stage, I took a deep breath — not only to take in the message and the magnitude of the campaign, but because I was suddenly transported back to Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya — a place thousands of miles away from New York City. I thought about how I, a child of war, could find myself here, on such a stage. And how this campaign reflects my journey — a story that could have easily been overlooked, yet became possible because someone, somewhere, chose to invest in me and acknowledge my existence.

If you had told a young Mary Maker that one day she would graduate high school, get into college, and hold a degree in her hands, I would have laughed and said, you must be joking. How does a girl who spent two decades of her life in a refugee camp find her way out and join the small community — just 7% — of refugees worldwide with access to higher education?

Nelson Mandela once said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” For many refugee women, these words are not just a quote—they are a question we wrestle with every day. Can the daughters of peasants really become doctors? Can the sons of farmers become leaders? Can refugees be educated, find belonging, and be seen as part of new communities? For us, education often felt like a distant dream,something we longed for deeply, yet something that never seemed to long for us in return.

The realities of being a refugee woman catch up with you quickly — not in a way that promises redemption, but in an environment where you must fight every day and defy cultural norms just to earn a place in a classroom. How do you persevere when you’re one of 200 children singing nursery rhymes in a foreign language — relearning normalcy, relearning life without a country, starting again with the basics of A-B-C and 1-2-3?

For me, the Building Better Futures campaign represents that journey — advocacy in its truest and most demanding form, because sometimes the hardest fight is the one you wage for yourself.

I remember when I first graduated high school. My friend, Maggy Anyier Kiir, and I volunteered as teachers at Kakuma Refugee Secondary School. Our applications were accepted almost immediately, joining a staff of about seventy — eighty percent of whom were “incentive teachers,” or refugee teachers. Most of us were not formally trained, but we helped where we could. If you scored an A in math after the KCSE (Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education), you became the math teacher.

I remember staying up late, revising lessons, praying I wouldn’t misteach my students in the morning. In overcrowded classrooms of 70 to 120 students, with only a handful of textbooks, I watched the quiet resilience of young people who showed up every day despite hunger, water shortages, unsafe travel, and uncertainty. The teachers showed up too. And one day, when a student asked me, “Madam Mary, why aren’t you in college?” I was speechless. How could I tell them that I didn’t even know the names of colleges? That I had no laptop, no counselor, no electricity but I had will and passion, not just for myself, but for them; to dream, to learn, and to one day get to college.

Getting to college came after four long years of applications, rejections, and relentless trying. It started when I joined a program in Rwanda that introduced me to the SATs, the Duolingo English Test, the Common App, and how to research universities. For the first time, I felt seen — even marketable. Two other students from Kakuma, Diing Manyang and Dudi Miabok, had gone through the same program and were later admitted to George Washington University and Harvard. We had always been capable; we just needed the tools to open the door.

We have lived and breathed the camp. We know what it means to feel trapped, with no way forward. The yearning to break those walls never leaves us. But when you educate a refugee woman, you don’t just transform one life — you uplift entire communities. Poet Emi Mahmoud captures it beautifully in her poem Mama: “We carry the wings of amputees beneath our shoulder blades.”

When I finally arrived at St. Olaf College in Minnesota as a Mastercard Foundation scholar, a similar program to Dafi the program that Building Better Futures is supporting, the three of us, together with our teacher from Rwanda, Deirdre Hand, founded Elimisha Kakuma meaning “Educate Kakuma.” 

In just four years, we’ve helped 47 students gain admission to top universities around the world, securing nearly $20 million in scholarships. The heart of this success lies in collaboration with universities and with partners like Virginia Tech’s Center for Refugee, Migrant, and Displacement Studies.

Building Better Futures  is about getting 1,000 girls into universities. But it doesn’t stop there. It's also about the countless communities that rise with them. One of our students, Rhoda Akon, now about to graduate from the University of Calgary, started the Kakuma Empowerment Program, mentoring over 600 refugee youths in the camp. That’s not one girl’s education; that’s 601 futures changed.

Raising $15 million by 2028 may seem like a big goal, but it is absolutely possible. I know because I’ve done it for my own non-profit—with a small team and a lot of determination, we have helped secure $20 million in just five years. I believe we can do it again together for this campaign, especially because we are united by a shared goal to help transform even more lives.

I often think about the power that unfolds when women gather around a table; the stories we share, the meals we cook, the communities we build and lift. So call your friends. Contribute to the education of even one girl. Because when you do, you may just be opening the doors for 600 more generations to follow.