For Aderonke Olisa, Empowering Girls Starts With Giving Them the Right Information

There is something about the way Aderonke Olisa talks about girls that makes it clear this work is personal. Not personal in the sense that she has all the answers. Rather, she seems deeply aware of what can happen when a girl is growing up without the information, guidance, confidence or safe spaces she needs to navigate the world around her.

Perhaps that is why, for more than a decade, Aderonke has kept returning to the same question in different forms: What would change if girls had the knowledge, support and opportunities they needed to thrive? Her answer has been a life built around creating those opportunities.

Aderonke’s journey into this work began in 2015 during her National Youth Service Corps year in Akwa Ibom. There, she encountered girls whose lives were being affected by issues including teenage pregnancy and school dropout. Rather than simply observe the challenges around her, she began creating a safe space where girls could receive mentorship, life-skills support and sexual and reproductive health education.

It was a small beginning, but it became a defining one. By the following year, that work had grown into the Chayil Girls Conference, creating a platform through which girls could be equipped with knowledge, confidence and the tools to make better decisions about their lives.

Looking back, that early experience offers a glimpse into the kind of changemaker Aderonke would become. She does not approach girls’ empowerment as a single issue. For her, a girl cannot be separated from her health, her education, her mental well-being, her safety, her economic opportunities or the social expectations surrounding her. That understanding has shaped the last decade of her work.

Today, Aderonke is a public health professional, project manager, gender-based violence and gender equity advocate whose work spans adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health, education, mental health and girls’ empowerment. She leads Omidan Health and Empowerment Initiative, a women-led organisation working across health education, community advocacy, digital storytelling and youth leadership. Through Omidan and platforms such as SabiGirlPrefect, she has reached more than 50,000 young people with digital health education and more than 2,000 adolescents and young women through empowerment and life-skills programmes.

But perhaps one of the clearest ways to understand Aderonke’s philosophy is to look at what she does with information. She turns it into something girls can actually use.

That is the thinking behind Every Girl’s Health Guide, her girl-centred health education book for pre-teens and adolescents. Rather than presenting health information in language that feels clinical or distant, the book uses age-appropriate explanations, illustrations and culturally relevant content to help girls understand their bodies, their well-being, relationships, life skills and issues around gender-based violence. More than 200 copies have been distributed and the resource is being used through school girls’ clubs and community outreach programmes.

For Aderonke, however, information is only the beginning. She is equally interested in what happens when a girl has someone walking alongside her. That belief led to Inspire Her Africa, her mentorship programme for young women. Through the programme, she has mentored more than 30 young women around confidence, career, leadership, education and purpose.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, that commitment took on an even larger dimension. She organised a 30-day mentorship programme that brought together 600 girls and young women from Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania, with some participants continuing into a six-month mentorship programme afterwards.

It is a pattern that appears repeatedly in Aderonke’s work: see the problem, create a space, bring people together, give them the knowledge and tools to move forward, then build something that can outlive the moment.

Over time, that approach has taken her beyond direct mentorship and into advocacy. She has contributed to technical working groups, youth-led platforms, public dialogues and media conversations on issues affecting young people. Her advocacy has included menstrual health, gender-based violence, child marriage, cervical cancer prevention and HPV vaccination.

In 2024, for example, Omidan Health Initiative called for government support to subsidise sanitary pads, making the case that menstrual health should be treated as a public health and dignity issue rather than a private burden for girls and women to solve alone.

And then there is the work happening at community level.

In Gbazango, Abuja, Aderonke’s work has increasingly reflected a deeper understanding of what sustainable empowerment looks like. Through the Girls Thrive programme, adolescent girls were not simply brought into a room to receive training. They were part of identifying the challenges affecting girls in their community and shaping the response.

The programme brought together girls, community leaders, women leaders, health workers and local officials to explore issues including teenage pregnancy, gender-based violence, reproductive health information, mental health and economic vulnerability. The resulting programme combined menstrual health education, mental health awareness, confidence building and vocational skills. Forty-six girls aged 15 to 19 graduated from the programme, while a Girls Thrive Hub was established within the community Primary Health Care Centre to provide continued access to health information, counselling, skills and mentorship.

That evolution is important because the Aderonke of today is not simply asking, “How do we help this girl?” She is asking, “What would it take for this girl to have the support she needs even after we leave?”

That question changes the work. It moves the conversation from intervention to systems, from awareness to access, and from telling girls what they should know to creating environments where they can ask questions, make decisions and participate in shaping the solutions that affect them.

It also explains why Aderonke’s work has taken so many forms. She is a public health professional, a project manager, a consultant, a speaker, an author, a coach, a mentor and an advocate. But these are not disconnected identities. They are different expressions of the same conviction.

That girls deserve better information. That young women deserve someone to believe in them. That health education should not be reserved for those who already have access. And that empowerment is not simply about telling people they can do more; it is about helping create the conditions that make doing more possible.

More than ten years after she first created that safe space for girls in Akwa Ibom, Aderonke is still creating spaces. Only now, there are more of them. There are books in the hands of girls, mentorship communities, digital platforms, school programmes, advocacy conversations, health hubs, public health campaigns and young women who have themselves become more confident because someone once made room for them.

Perhaps that is the most compelling part of Aderonke Olisa’s story. She did not begin with a grand institution or a carefully mapped-out career in girls’ empowerment. She encountered girls who needed help. She responded. And then she kept responding until that response became a body of work.

A decade later, the work continues to grow. And so does the number of girls whose stories may look different because Aderonke Olisa decided, many years ago, that simply seeing the problem was not enough.