This shame and stigma around disability exists in diverse communities, even those with financial resources.
“We learned that one of the biggest barriers to grapple with are beliefs about disability,” Maria explains. “For example, people think that someone has been bewitched, that the woman was unfaithful, or that if their child were to sit with another child with a disability, they might be infected.”
In response, Maria and her team began taking a projector into the community to share short videos followed by reflection and discussion. “You could see that there’s a huge difference between what they thought they knew and what we were able to share,” she says.
Over time, Maria realized that listening to communities was only part of the journey. Learning alongside other leaders navigating similar challenges and opportunities would become just as important to her work’s impact.
Learning Together
Maria’s work led her to connecting with other social change leaders across Africa. For Maria, the power of those relationships and tapping into a community of social change leaders is often simple, but profound.
“The power of community for social change leaders, or entrepreneurs like myself, is just people who actually get you,” she says. “And are willing to open doors for you, or listen to you, or advise you, because help doesn’t necessarily always have to be monetary. “Sometimes it’s just people saying, we kind of have this thing going on, and we’re going to figure it out together.”
Early relationships with organizations like Akili Dada, along with participation in fellowships and leadership networks strengthened her confidence as a leader and encouraged her to continue growing the work.
“All of us, our families thought we were crazy,” she says with a smile. “But when we come together, we understand each other. We create that sense of belief.”
Discovering Girls’ Agency
Along the way, those relationships began shaping not only the growth of the organization, but also Maria’s vision for what is possible for girls with disabilities.
At her first Opportunity Collaboration Conference, Maria met Margaret Butler, who shared her vision for what would eventually become Amplify Girls, a network of organizations working to strengthen girls’ agency across Africa.
The concept was new to Maria. “I didn’t know about agency,” she says. “It was just a word you might hear somewhere, maybe a travel agency. But the idea that girls have this innate power that can be nurtured, that can give them that sense of self-belief, that was a powerful realization.”
As she listened and continued to connect with Margaret over following months, the idea began to resonate more deeply. “Learning from their work, and seeing how they do their programming, just gave me an aha moment,” she shares. Seeing how other organizations approached girls’ leadership sparked new ideas for The Action Foundation, including designing a mentorship program for girls with disabilities, the first of its kind.
Growing Impact Together
As a founding partner of Amplify Girls, The Action Foundation has also helped develop the Adolescent Girls’ Agency Survey, a groundbreaking tool created through collaboration among Amplify Girls partners that is designed to capture the multidimensional construct of girls’ agency.
At the same time, Maria has found herself increasingly sharing lessons from her own journey, especially with others working in the disability inclusion space. This spirit of collaboration helped spark the African Disability Collaboration, a growing network of organizations working together to strengthen disability inclusion across the continent.
The idea first surfaced during a gathering of disability leaders exploring how their work might be more connected. Although Maria was not able to attend the initial meeting, many of the leaders present believed she should be part of the effort.
“The disability inclusion community in East Africa is quite small,” she says. “When they were deciding they wanted to work together, every single person said, ‘Maria should be here.’” Soon her phone began filling with messages.
“I had so many WhatsApps,” she remembers. “Everyone was saying, we’re trying to do this thing — are you interested?”
Today, the African Disability Collaboration is growing as a space where organizations share knowledge, strengthen collaboration, and work together to advance disability inclusion across Africa.
Looking back, Maria sees how many important moments in her journey began in conversation. Those relationships helped shape The Action Foundation into what it is today, and now, Maria is helping create those same spaces for others.
Over the years, she’s learned that the most meaningful progress rarely happens alone. As new collaborations emerge across Africa, she sees the same spirit taking root: leaders strengthening one another and finding new possibilities not only for their organizations, but for the communities they serve. And when those communities of leaders come together, she believes, the impact grows far beyond what any one organization could accomplish on its own.
