Some opportunities change one life. Others continue moving, creating a ripple effect that reaches families, communities and even future generations.

This Women's Month, the FirstRand Foundations are celebrating women who embody that idea through Built to be Shared, a campaign recognising those who have taken the opportunities they received and transformed them into opportunities for others.

The women featured in the campaign represent a diverse range of sectors, communities and professional backgrounds. They include educators, researchers and healthcare leaders, as well as entrepreneurs, advocates and community changemakers. Although their individual journeys are distinct, they are united by a shared commitment to extending the opportunities, support and knowledge they have received in ways that create meaningful opportunities for others.

The journey from shared opportunity to educational innovation

Orphaned at a young age, Nosipho Gumede’s journey was profoundly shaped by the women in her community who recognised her potential and chose to invest in it. One baked and sold milk tarts to help fund her attendance at a school camp. Another drove her two hours so that she could write a bursary test. A third bought her bed linen for her first winter in Johannesburg. These were simple yet significant acts of generosity, offered without any expectation of return.

She went on to win an Anglo-American bursary, became a metallurgist and began a thriving career in the mining industry and later as a business improvement specialist. Then she gave it up to give back. Gumede became an independent postgraduate curriculum designer, deciding to hand others "what this library and engineering gave to me, doorways to survival through books and learning." At North-West University, she designed two postgraduate diplomas combining Industrial Engineering with Sustainability and Sustainable Mining, online, distance-learning qualifications built for people who can't put their lives on hold to study. This year's first graduating cohort is 50% women. One student recently wrote to tell her that a module she was studying gave her the exact language she needed to navigate a difficult restructuring process at work. Proof, Gumede says, that a qualification can do more than add a line to a CV.

Today, Gumede is pursuing a PhD in Design at the University of the Arts London, continuing a lifelong commitment to learning while helping create opportunities for others to do the same.

Opening doors through inclusion and skill in rural KwaZulu-Natal

National Teaching Award winner Martha Combrinck, principal of Thuthukani Special School leads 120 staff in caring for 450 children with disabilities. A qualified Occupational Therapist, she traces her purpose back to grade 10, watching an OT session help her nephew, who lived with epilepsy and developmental delays, smile and progress. She's spent 21 years since as a female principal in a male-dominated field, one of just 32% of South African school principals who are women, navigating the assumption that kindness in leadership is weakness.

After winning the 2025 National Teaching Award for Excellence in Special Needs Leadership, the FirstRand Foundation and the Sifiso Learning Group sponsored her and five other category winners on a ten-day study tour to Denmark, where she encountered the international best practices she's since brought home.

Discovering the Department of Education could only fund half the staff her school needs, Combrinck built a volunteer programme instead of waiting for a solution. Today, 44 volunteers work alongside her daily. Around 98% of them are local women. Through a two-year training programme, they gain hands-on clinical experience; many go on to study education or caregiving, and many are hired permanently. When her learners turn 18, those assessed for entrepreneurship or employment spend an extra year mastering trades, sewing, gardening, industrial cleaning and Zulu crafts before sitting practical exams set by local hotels, B&Bs and agricultural colleges. Graduates are then gifted the tools to start their own businesses through networks she's built over two decades.

It often starts smaller than any programme, though. When Combrinck noticed a mother named Pranitha spending her days waiting outside the school gate for her autistic son, she invited her in for a cup of tea. Pranitha joined the volunteer programme, then trained alongside the therapists, then was hired as a formal teacher assistant. She's studying toward her own degree in education now, while her son talks, makes friends and thrives. "You truly never know," Combrinck says, "how you might alter the trajectory of a life by simply offering a cup of tea, a shelter from the storm, and a chance to be part of something bigger."

What happens when you ask what else is possible?

In 2019, at 34, Teboho Motubatse lost her eyesight. Rehabilitation programmes at Optima College and the Hein Wagner Academy introduced her to mobility training and assistive technology, and to a realisation that would define the rest of her career: "disability does not mean inability." She founded Vision Ability Tech Academy to become, in her words, "a point of contact for those navigating vision loss" in communities that don't have access to the training she was lucky enough to receive. Her journey has also been supported through Laureus Sport for Good South Africa, an organisation that uses sport as a catalyst for inclusion and social change.

Her work spans mobility training where she has, more than once, given away her own white cane so someone else could begin their journey. It also includes financial literacy, running workshops with King Price Insurance that have helped township women running informal businesses (selling magwinya, ice pops, doing hair) build budgeting and saving skills. She's also part of a tandem cycling team for blind and visually impaired riders, currently its only woman, racing alongside teammates rebuilding their lives after addiction.

The obstacles have been real. When tandem bicycles proved too costly to own, she wrote and sold a children's book, My Super Blind Mom, to fund her first one. When she was invited to pitch for funding on a major TV platform, organisers asked if she could read Braille and excluded her when she explained she uses assistive technology instead. "Many systems," she says, "are still not designed for people with disabilities in mind."

One story stays with her most: Koko Malapane, who lost a leg to diabetes and later her eyesight too. Motubatse helped raise funds for a smartphone and trained her on a screen reader, Koko can now bank, message her family and stay in touch with her prayer group independently. "Sometimes changing one life," Motubatse says, "creates a ripple effect that reaches an entire family and community." It's a lesson she learned from her own mother, paralysed by a stroke for nearly a decade, who never let a wheelchair become her identity. Motubatse's own motto has become something of a mic drop: "I did all these things with my eyes closed. What more can you do with your eyes wide open?"

Mam Angeline Masuku: Lifting as She Rises

Through ifa crafted, a craft development and entrepreneurship programme run by the KwaZulu-Natal Society of Arts (KZNSA) in KwaZulu-Natal, Mam Angeline Masuku trains women in skills and entrepreneurship, turning traditional craft into income, confidence and, eventually, leadership. "I saw women in my community full of potential, but lacking access to opportunity," she says. "When we invest in women, we invest in entire families and communities."

The path hasn't been easy. Funding constraints, resourcing gaps and slow-moving systems are constant companions. But the results keep her going: one young mother who joined the programme with no income at all now runs her own small business, and mentors others in turn. Masuku learned that instinct from her aunt, who taught her resilience and compassion, and "to lift others as I rise." It's a lesson she's determined to pass on. What she wants the next generation of women to inherit, she says, is "economic freedom, courage, and communities that support them. Most importantly, the confidence to lead, create, and thrive without apology."

The thread that connects them

Different sectors, different starting points but each of these women can point to the exact moment someone chose to invest in them, and each chose, in turn, to become that person for someone else. That's not a coincidence. It's the entire premise of Built to Be Shared. The idea that opportunity, properly shared, doesn't run out. It multiplies.