GENDER EQUALITY ADVOCATE AND CEO BREAKING BARRIERS IN NIGERIA

As founder and CEO of the FAME Foundation, which stands for Female Advocacy, Mentoring, and Empowerment, Aderonke Bello focuses on uniting Nigerian women and girls through sports participation and works to provide them access to quality education.

For example, for International Women’s Day in 2019, FAME hosted a football match that included more than 3,000 community members who watched the game, participated in free health and sex education classes, and received tests for sexually-transmitted infections. Proceeds from the event provided full scholarships for eight rural girls in her programs. She has an ongoing project in Nigeria called #LetGirlsPlay an initiative that uses sports to address and advocate for issues bordering on women and girls development like GBV, Inequality, Lack of Access to Gender Equality and others.

For her work with FAME, Aderonke won the African Girl-Child Advocate award and the Girl-Child Education Champion award from the former President of Malawi, Joyce Banda. However, Aderonke knows more work is needed to break long-standing traditions that leave women behind and to address the severe levels of gender inequality present in her country. According to UNICEF, in Nigeria 44% of girls are married before the age of 18, and 18% are married before the age of 15.

Through her GSMP experience, Aderonke seeks to develop skills needed to expand the FAME Foundation, including new ways to gain public support, best practices for curriculum delivery and methodology, and ways to include technology into her programs using sports for women and girls empowerment.

For GSMP: Empowering Women through Sports 2019, Aderonke will be mentored by Emi FitzGerald, Director of Earned Media at Saatchi & Saatchi, and her team in Dallas, Texas.