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Meet our Woman Crush Wednesday, Miriam Mason-Sesay.
Miriam was born in the rural Northamptonshire, UK, studied languages, trained as a teacher, gained wide teaching experience across inner-city colleges and private schools in England, teaching in the country for 8 years before heading out to start EducAid’s first school in a back garden with a small whiteboard in Sierra Leone, around the year 2000. The school was founded as a charity by her brother inspired Miriam’s radical change of direction.
She has been in the country for about 22 years providing free and quality education to the less privilege. She is the country Director of EducAid Sierra Leone.
Miriam relocated to Freetown and set up her school for vulnerable children – ex-combatants, orphans, and child-mothers. The school started with twenty children back then, but has since flourished and now educates thousands of students across primary and secondary schools as well as delivering best-practice training and management programmes for state-employed teachers from across the nation. Due to a high emphasis on equality, the participation rate of girls in EducAid secondary school is double the Sierra Leone average. Miriam leads a teaching team of 150, two-thirds of whom are past pupils. She champions radical education methodologies that enable individuals and communities to challenge and overcome poverty.
Her passionate commitment to high quality, holistic education with a strong focus on gender equality has won Miriam recognition in her native United Kingdom with an award of the Member of the British Empire (MBE), in Sierra Leone with an award of the Member of the Order of Rokel (MOR) and globally when she was a Top 50 finalist for the prestigious Global Teacher Prize.
Miriam presently partners with Minister of Basic And Senior Secondary School Education (MBSSE) in the fight for free and quality education flagship of President Bio.
