When we called for young women to enter a $100,000 scholarship contest to mark our 80th birthday, we were overwhelmed with inspirational entries. Now the judges and The Weekly’s readers have made their decision and it’s time to reveal our Women of the Future.
Sydney schoolteacher Susanna Matters runs a charity providing sanitary pads to girls in Kenya. As the judges’ choice winner, Susanna has won a $20,000 fund for helping girls to meet the most basic of needs and empowering women in the process.
As a teacher, Susanna always puts her students’ welfare first, and that is what led the 25-year-old to start an international charity that is now providing valuable aid for girls in Africa’s rural Kenya.
Eighteen months ago, volunteering as a teacher in Muhaka, a village in south-east Kenya, the young English teacher started to notice some of her students missing classes and discovered it was because of their periods.
“Poverty in Kenya meant girls don’t always have access to the kind of sanitary pads that we are used to in Australia. Instead, they used rags or bits of old mattresses or even cow dung, and that also meant a high rate of infection and sickness,” she says.
She began handing out as many sanitary pads as she could afford to her students, and on her way back to Australia, had the brilliant idea to start a charity, Goods for Girls, which now trains girls to make their own washable, environmentally friendly sanitary pads.
Also receiving a $20,000 fund is 18-year-old India McGuigan, who has been selected as the people’s choice winner.
At 15, India was diagnosed with a high-grade tumour on her spinal cord, which left her with a spinal injury that confined her to a wheelchair.
The young Queenslander hasn’t let a year-long bout of chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and rehabilitation to allow her to walk again, get in the way of her ambitions.
India excelled in her high school studies and is well on her way to achieving her dream of becoming a doctor, having secured a place to study medicine at Queensland University, and in her spare time has raised more then $5000 for 12- to 24-year-olds with cancer through the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Australia and Canteen.
Six runners-up, Samantha Cran, Jane Marx, Rebecca Roberts, Ayesha Lutschini, Ling San Lau and Amy Schirmer, have also been awarded $10,000 each. Congratulations to all our Women of the Future.
