Leading with Care: How Women Around the World are Inspiring Businesses, Empowering Communities, and Creating Opportunity

Living Life on the Brink

Lester Zakaria takes nothing for granted. At forty, she has already reached her life expectancy in Malawi, a landlocked country in southeast Africa that is home to a population of thirteen million. Lester lives in Chiwe, one of many villages dotting the landscape of one of the poorest nations on earth. Because they live on less than 20 cents a day, life for most women in Malawi is grim, but Lester has something that only a handful of women in her country possess—an education.

Although nearly half of Malawi’s population is under age fifteen, schooling has traditionally been considered unattainable for girls. And even where schools do exist, they are grossly underfunded and poorly attended because the able-bodied, ...