Patience Agasaro UwasePatience was born in Kigali, Rwanda to a family with five children and graduated from Nu Vision high school in 2015. Patience credits having grown up in a family that values the importance of education as influencing her passion for books and for education as a whole. This particular passion has been the motivation behind her SHE-CAN Take the Lead Project called “Read for a Change.” Patience donated books to a local primary school in her hometown and initiated a reading program for the students there in order to cultivate a culture of reading and love for books. Patience identifies herself as having been a strong feminist for as long as she can remember, always trying to show her community that girls have much more to give to society than what is conventionally expected. Her feminist ideals inspired her to found a girl’s empowerment club called the Warris Girls’ Project (meaning “Desert Flower”), which utilizes fundraising in order to help younger girls successfully complete their primary and secondary levels of education. Patience also worked on a database project with WorldWideWomen, which will help them initiate a more targeted marketing strategy. She is currently a freshman at Bucknell University, where she studies economics. Patience aspires to become a source of inspiration for many young women. She is adamant in her beliefs that women should not be intimidated by what society categorizes them as and should instead rise above oppressive gender norms to devote their efforts toward building a better, more equitable world.
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