Eight years ago, on International Women’s Day in March 2018, I launched this website, GlobalEdLeadership. My first blog post was titled “Girls’ Education Goes Beyond Getting Girls into School.” In that post, I wrote about remarkable schools for girls in Sub-Saharan Africa and argued that access to education was only the beginning. Education had to mean agency, voice, opportunity, and leadership.
Eight years later, on International Women’s Day 2026, I find myself reflecting not just on access—but on power. This year, I have the privilege of working with three extraordinary women selected as Women PeaceMakers by the Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego: Estefanía Castañeda Pérez, Lilian Olivia Orero, and Noemy Molina.
The Women PeaceMakers Fellows Program, now more than two decades old, brings courageous women leaders from around the world to reflect on and document their peacemaking work. These are not theoretical conversations. These are women operating in complex political and social systems, confronting injustice in real time and in real communities.
Although their contexts are very different—from migrant communities along the U.S.–Mexico border, to grassroots organizing, to peacebuilding work in East Africa—their work shares a common thread. Each is working not simply to provide services or support individuals, but to change the systems that shape people’s lives. They are not only expanding access. They are challenging the structures that determine who has power, whose voices are heard, and whose lives are protected.
Lilian Olivia Orero: When Technology Moves Faster Than Law: Kenya
One of the women is Lilian Olivia Orero, who leads efforts in Kenya to address the gap between the speed of technology and the pace of law. As the Founder and Executive Director of SafeOnline Women Kenya (SOW-Kenya), Lilian works at the intersection of digital rights, gender justice, and technology policy, fighting a form of harm that is still largely invisible to many legal systems: technology-facilitated gender-based violence. In Kenya and across Africa, women are being harassed, stalked, blackmailed, and silenced online, yet the laws, institutions, and support systems needed to protect them have not kept pace. Lilian is working to build those systems.
Through SOW-Kenya, she has developed a TechSecure Literacy Curriculum that has reached more than one thousand women across Kenya, and created SafeHer, an AI-powered mobile application that allows survivors to report incidents securely and access support, recently recognized with an international Safety by Design Award. Her Women PeaceMakers research extends this work into new and urgent territory. As this year’s fellowship theme centers on borders, gender, and violence reduction, Lilian is examining how digital border systems in Kenya, including biometric identification, algorithmic profiling, and device searches, produce gendered harms that go largely undocumented. Her research challenges a common assumption: that digital border harms only affect vulnerable or undocumented populations. When professional women with valid visas and legal standing still face biometric failures, invasive searches of private devices, and algorithmic flags they cannot explain or contest, the problem is not an exception. It is a design flaw. And when those systems have been built primarily on data from lighter-skinned populations, African women pay a disproportionate price. Lilian’s goal is to make these harms visible, build the evidence base Kenya needs for reform, and demonstrate that rights-based digital governance is not only possible but necessary. Her question is never simply how to help survivors. It is how to rewrite the rules so that fewer women become survivors in the first place.
Noemy Molina: When Deportation Is Not the End of the Story: El Salvador
Noemy Molina’s work focuses on the rights and dignity of migrant communities and the structural forces that shape their lives. Drawing on her own lived experiences and community leadership, she has become a powerful advocate for migrants who often find themselves navigating complex systems of law, labor, and social exclusion.
Her work centers on helping migrant communities understand their rights, build collective voice, and challenge systems that leave them vulnerable to exploitation and discrimination. Through organizing, education, and advocacy, she has helped create pathways for migrants to move from invisibility to leadership within their communities.
Noemy’s work reflects a deep understanding that lasting change requires more than individual resilience. It requires collective action and structural transformation—ensuring that the systems governing migration, labor, and social protection recognize the dignity and humanity of those they affect.
Estefanía Castañeda Pérez: When Borders Become Sites of Invisibility: Mexico–United States
Estefanía Castañeda Pérez is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. Much of Estefanía’s work focuses on the transborder region between the United States and Mexico, where families, cultures, and economies flow across borders even as legal systems attempt to contain them. Through interviews and community-engaged research, she explores how migrants and border residents navigate legal systems that profoundly affect mobility, safety, identity, and belonging.
But Estefanía’s work does not stop at analysis. She is deeply engaged in supporting the leadership of those most affected by these systems. Through RISE San Diego’s Urban Leadership Fellowship, she developed a Community Action Project designed to empower Transfronteriza women—women whose lives are shaped by the experience of crossing, living across, and being defined by borders. The project focuses on building leadership skills, strengthening networks of support, and creating spaces where these women can reflect on their experiences and advocate for change in their communities. In both her scholarship and her community engagement, Estefanía’s work highlights an essential insight: borders are not just lines on maps. They are systems of power that shape people’s lives. Meaningful change requires listening to and learning from those who live those realities every day.
Beyond Access
Recently, I was reminded of the importance of systems while learning more about women’s leadership in Namibia, a country in southern Africa that has become an example of what intentional institutional change can look like. Namibia has made significant progress in women’s political representation, with women holding a substantial share of seats in parliament and leadership positions in government.
These changes did not happen by accident. They are the result of years of advocacy, policy reform, and deliberate efforts to ensure women have pathways into leadership. Namibia’s experience offers an important reminder: progress toward gender equity often comes not only from individual leaders but from changes in the rules and institutions that shape opportunity.
When I wrote that first blog post eight years ago, I was thinking primarily about access to education, opportunity, and leadership for girls. Today, as I listen to the experiences of these three remarkable women, I am reminded that access alone is never enough. Access can open doors, but systems determine what happens once people walk through them.
The work of Lilian, Estefanía, and Noemy reminds us that justice requires more than expanding opportunity. It requires questioning the rules themselves—who wrote them, who benefits from them, and how they might be redesigned to create more just and inclusive societies.
On this International Women’s Day, their leadership offers a powerful reminder: lasting change often begins with those closest to the problem and courageous enough to imagine something better.