CHIME FOR CHANGE celebrates Shantel Marekera as part of Equality Now’s 30 for 30, featuring 30 women and changemakers who have played a key role in making equality reality as part of our 30th anniversary celebrations.

“We are done talking. Right now, what we need is transformative change. Change that is visible to everyone, not just those in this room.” 

These were the powerful words shared by Shantel Marekera during UN Women’s Generation Equality Forum in Paris in 2021. 

Shantel is a changemaker. She represents the next generation of activists championing gender equality and inspiring positive change through self-expression and active citizenship. Her passion for advocacy, policy, and international human rights law – particularly as it concerns women’s rights in her home country of Zimbabwe – runs deep. Her leadership is profound: she is a member of the Generation Equality Forum Youth Task Force, a Rhodes Scholar, a UN Millennium Fellow, a Resolution Project Fellow, a member of the US Achiever Program, as well as the Global Peace Chain Country Director and Global Peace Ambassador for Zimbabwe, all demonstrating her significant impact and influence. 

With a determination to help girls in her native Zimbabwe attend school, she launched the Little Dreamers Foundation, a preschool for low-income children, in her community of Harare, Zimbabwe. It is Shantel’s work and spirit to bring about change in her community for current and future generations that inspire us at CHIME FOR CHANGE. She is focused on justice and brings power to a long-held belief at CHIME: that none of us can move forward if half of us are held back.

We are inspired by Shantel’s activism and commitment to gender equality. We presented her with the fourth annual Changemaker Award at Equality Now’s Make Equality Reality Gala to recognize her powerful contributions and work to address critical challenges in the gender equality movement. She stands at the forefront of transformative leadership in her community, fighting against period poverty and child marriage and advocating for economic and gender justice, among other issues. We are motivated by her dream to stand for the most vulnerable communities around the world and to be the voice of those who have been historically marginalized, especially women and girls in all their diversity.

CHIME FOR CHANGE is a global campaign founded by Gucci in 2013 to convene, unite and strengthen the voices speaking out for gender equality.