There are people who encounter a problem and move on. And then there are people who encounter a problem and cannot quite look away.
For nearly a decade, Rifkatu Ademola-Bello has remained close to some of the challenges confronting women and girls in underserved communities across Nigeria. What began as work in the development space has grown into a wider journey through advocacy, education, community development, social innovation and entrepreneurship.
Today, she is the Founder and Executive Director of the Focusing on Women and Girls Initiative for Positive Change (FOWGI), an organisation working across areas including girls’ education, menstrual health, economic empowerment and the wellbeing of vulnerable communities.
The numbers attached to the work are significant. Her programmes have reached thousands of women and girls, including through the distribution of more than 60,000 sanitary products and initiatives aimed at improving access to education, dignity and opportunity.
But there is a danger in telling a story like Rifkatu’s only through numbers. Numbers can tell us how many girls received support. They cannot tell us what it feels like to sit with a girl who has stopped believing that her circumstances can change.
They can tell us how many sanitary products were distributed. They cannot tell us what it means for a girl to walk into a classroom during her period without the fear, embarrassment or uncertainty that might otherwise keep her at home.
They can tell us that a summit was organised. They cannot tell us what happens when people who have spent years working separately finally begin to imagine what could happen if they worked together.
That is the part of Rifkatu’s story that sits beneath the work.
Her journey has been shaped by an understanding that the problems facing women and girls are rarely isolated. A girl’s education can be affected by poverty. Menstrual health can affect school attendance. Economic vulnerability can limit choices. Insecurity can expose children to exploitation, child labour and gender-based violence.
The deeper you look, the harder it becomes to treat one problem at a time.
And perhaps there is something deeply significant about the fact that Rifkatu continues to do this work with girls and women despite having had to navigate her own share of life’s struggles. She is not standing outside the realities she speaks about, untouched by difficulty. Like anyone else, she has had seasons that have tested her, yet she has continued to show up for others. There is a quiet resilience in that choice—to keep building, keep serving and keep believing that someone else’s life can still become better, even while navigating your own challenges.
Rifkatu has spoken publicly about the ways insecurity and economic hardship can contribute to child labour, sexual and gender-based violence and the exploitation of vulnerable children, while highlighting economic empowerment as part of the solution. It is a perspective that moves the conversation beyond simply asking how we can help someone today.
The harder question is: how do we change the conditions that keep making people vulnerable?
That question has followed her work in menstrual health too.
FOWGI’s interventions have included the distribution of sanitary products, while Rifkatu has also advocated around the affordability and accessibility of menstrual products and the need for sustainable approaches to menstrual health.
Because menstrual dignity is about more than a product. It is about whether a girl can attend school without fear or embarrassment, whether her period becomes a reason to stay home, whether she has accurate information about her body and whether her family can afford what she needs. It is also about whether policies and systems make dignity possible for girls regardless of their economic circumstances.
The longer Rifkatu has worked in this space, the harder it becomes to separate one issue from another.
That same thinking can be seen in her work around education.
Through the SDG 4 for Girls Summit, she has created a platform for educators, advocates, policymakers and young leaders to have conversations about the barriers preventing girls from accessing quality education. The work is important because the education gap cannot be solved by schools alone. Government has a role. Families have a role. Communities have a role. Civil society has a role, and girls themselves must have a voice in conversations about their own futures.
For Rifkatu, bringing these different actors together is part of the work.
But perhaps what makes her journey particularly interesting is that her vision of impact does not stop at nonprofit programmes.
Alongside her development work, Rifkatu has also stepped into entrepreneurship through Botyum Atelier. That part of her story adds another dimension to the woman behind the work, because there is something revealing about a social-impact leader choosing to build not only programmes and institutions, but also a business.
The nonprofit world often revolves around grants, projects, partnerships and responding to social needs. Enterprise operates with a different logic. It asks questions about customers, value, sustainability, creativity and the ability to build something that can stand on its own.
For someone whose professional work has increasingly explored economic empowerment and sustainable solutions, entrepreneurship creates another space in which those questions can be lived rather than simply discussed. Botyum Atelier is therefore not just an additional line on her biography; it opens up a different conversation about Rifkatu herself.
What does she enjoy building? What does creativity mean to her? Why did she decide to enter the world of business? What has entrepreneurship taught her that development work could not? And does she see a connection between the two worlds, or does she deliberately keep them separate?
Those questions matter because changemakers are often reduced to the causes they champion.
We meet the Executive Director but not always the woman.
We know the organisation but not necessarily the person who goes home after the meeting, closes the laptop, worries about the next project, dreams about something completely unrelated to work, or decides to start something new.
Rifkatu’s story suggests that there is more to her than one institution or one cause. There is the development practitioner who has spent years thinking about women and girls, the advocate who has used her voice to push conversations around education, dignity and protection, the convener who brings people into the same room to think about solutions, and the entrepreneur building through Botyum Atelier.
Taken together, these different parts point to a woman interested not simply in talking about change, but in building things.
That distinction matters.
Social-impact work is often full of urgency. There is always another need, another community, another project and another problem demanding attention. The pressure to demonstrate results can make it easy to focus on what can be achieved within a particular funding cycle.
But lasting change asks a different set of questions.
What happens after the project ends? What remains when the funding runs out?
Can a community continue without the organisation? Can an intervention become a model?
Can people who were once beneficiaries become people who create opportunities for others? Can the work become sustainable?
These are questions Rifkatu’s journey increasingly seems to be moving towards.
Her interest in social innovation, enterprise and development reflects a desire to think beyond immediate interventions and towards longer-term pathways to opportunity and self-reliance.
And perhaps that is one of the biggest lessons of nearly a decade in the sector: good intentions are important, but they are not enough. Impact requires learning, partnerships, the humility to listen to communities, the courage to change course when something is not working, and the willingness to stay long enough to understand that the problem you first encountered may not actually be the whole problem.
For Rifkatu, the work has therefore become larger than any single programme.
It is about dignity.
It is about education.
It is about opportunity.
It is about women and girls having more choices about their own futures.
It is about building solutions that do not depend forever on someone coming from outside to provide an answer.
And increasingly, it is also about building.
Building an organisation.
Building platforms for conversation.
Building opportunities.
Building a business.
Building ideas that can exist beyond one project or one moment.
There is still another part of the story that numbers and professional biographies cannot capture—the girl Rifkatu once was, the family and environment that shaped her, her university years, the first jobs she held, the people who influenced her, the experiences that changed her direction, and the moments when the work became difficult enough to make her question whether she should continue.
Those details matter because people do not usually dedicate a decade of their lives to difficult problems by accident.
Something drives them.
Sometimes it is an experience they cannot forget.
Sometimes it is an injustice they cannot ignore.
Sometimes it is simply the conviction that once you have seen a problem closely enough, you have a responsibility to do something about it.
Whatever brought Rifkatu to this work, she has spent the years since turning that commitment into action.
And perhaps the most interesting thing about where she is now is that she is no longer building in just one direction.
She is building through social impact.
She is building through advocacy.
She is building through community.
And through Botyum Atelier, she is building through enterprise too.
That makes her story less about a woman who chose one cause and more about a woman figuring out, in real time, what it means to create a life around purpose.
The work is still evolving.
So is she.
And perhaps that is the real story behind Rifkatu Ademola-Bello: not simply how many women and girls she has reached, how many programmes she has led or how many conversations she has convened, but the ongoing process of becoming the kind of person who can build things that make a difference, and, hopefully, leave something useful behind when she is no longer the one holding them together.
