Graça Machel

Graça Machel joined Mozambique's FRELIMO independence movement as a student and after independence in 1975 became the newly formed country's first minister of education, building schools in a nation with almost no formal education system and literacy rates below ten per cent. She was married to Mozambique's first president, Samora Machel, who died in a plane crash in 1986.

In 1994 the UN Secretary-General asked her to lead a study into the impact of armed conflict on children, a subject then treated mostly as a side effect of war rather than a crisis in its own right. Her 1996 report, drawing on visits to conflict zones across Africa, Asia and the Balkans, documented child soldiers, sexual violence, landmine injuries and the collapse of health and schooling systems, and pushed the UN to create a dedicated mandate for children and armed conflict that still exists.

She went on to co-found the Graça Machel Trust, focused on women's economic empowerment in Africa, and became a founding member of the Elders, the group of senior statesmen assembled by Nelson Mandela, whom she married in 1998. She remains one of the few people to have served as first lady of two different African countries, and has continued to press governments on child protection into her seventies and eighties.