I Know How it Feels to Grow Up in Poverty

Zainab Hawa Bangura is the Director-General of the United Nations Office at Nairobi (UNON) and worries for the health and safety of her staff and the populations they serve in the face COVID-19. Zainab began her career as a women's rights campaigner in her home country of Sierra Leone. Her reasons were personal: at age 12, her father, an Imam, wanted to marry her off to an older man. Her mother refused, insisting her daughter must be educated and sacrificed her own marriage for her daughter's future. Though extremely poor, her mother got her way and Zainab earned scholarships to study through university in London. Returning home, Zainab documented horrific atrocities during the civil war and then joined the government as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Health. As UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict from 2012-17, Zainab talks of the secondary trauma she felt after taking in the pain of countless accounts of rape inflicted on women and girls as a weapon of war.