Some women change lives. Others change the systems that shape them. This Women’s Month, under the national theme 'Building Resilient Economies for All', the FirstRand Foundations’ Built to Be Shared campaign recognises women who turned opportunities they were given into lasting impact, helping to strengthen an industry, expand access to education, shape the national response to violence, and transform healthcare.

Their fields could not be more different: agriculture, higher education, gender-based violence response, and palliative healthcare. But the pattern repeats itself in each story. Someone believed in them first. They gained skills, confidence, and opportunity. And rather than keep what they had been given, they built the conditions for others to inherit it too.

Rebuilding rural economies from the ground up

For more than 35 years, Dr Florence Nherera-Chokuda has worked to ensure that rural people, particularly women, are recognised as more than subsistence farmers. “The story of the African woman,” she says, is “visionary, strong, resourceful, and resilient despite enormous constraints.” She thinks often of the pastoralists of the Northern Cape rangelands, rising before dawn to tend livestock, protect their families, and lead their communities, while remaining excluded from formal economies and decision-making. That reality is what pulled her into livestock development and policy in the first place.

Her work now reaches beyond a single farm. As a senior Livestock Policy Advocate working across the African continent, she pushes for greater public and private investment in Africa's livestock sector, and mentors women into leadership across the entire value chain, from production to research to trade. Through initiatives such as Tuli Growth, she has also helped demonstrate how inclusive agricultural models can create opportunities that reach deep into rural economies. Her work has also supported the growth of community-owned institutions like the Hlanganani Association in KwaZulu-Natal and the National Livestock Farmers' Association of South Africa. She has helped young people move from undergraduate study through to PhDs, building careers as veterinarians, scientists, and executives along the way.

None of that came easily. Nherera-Chokuda has fought her way into leadership spaces where Black women were underrepresented, navigating exclusion, discrimination, and moments of real financial uncertainty. What kept her going, she says, is a simple conviction: “We are called to be stewards, not owners... The true measure of our lives is not what we accumulate, but what we cultivate, what we give, and whose lives are better because we were here.” Much of her mentorship happens for no fee at all. “I choose to give,” she says. “Gifts are meant to be shared.”

One story stays with her: that of the late Grancia Fortuin, a cattle farmer from the Free State who built a thriving enterprise while living with breast cancer, providing a livelihood not just for her own family but for the families of her farm workers. Before Grancia passed away in June 2026, her 16-year-old daughter had already chosen to carry her mother's vision forward—proof, Nherera-Chokuda says, that what you build outlives you when it is shared.

Growing the researchers who will grow the next ones

Prof Thobeka Ncanywa holds the FALF-FREF-NMU Research Chair in Entrepreneurship and Financial Inclusion at Nelson Mandela University, where she specialises in applied econometrics, development economics, and entrepreneurship education. But the work she is proudest of runs alongside her research: a mentorship initiative called 'Grow Your Own Timber', built to give early-career researchers and postgraduate students the guidance too many institutions cannot provide.

The problem she set out to solve is a structural one. Without proper supervision and support, she explains, publication output stalls, entrepreneurial thinking goes undeveloped, and universities lose out on the innovation that comes from strong graduate research. 'Grow Your Own Timber' supervises postgraduate students working on real contemporary economic issues while running the workshops, seminars, and networking events that help young academics build the confidence and the professional relationships the research world runs on. A particular focus of the programme is closing the gender gap in academia, making sure women researchers get the mentorship and opportunity to thrive in careers that have historically excluded them.

It is a gap Ncanywa knows from experience. “All my supervisors were male, and some of my mentors were also male,” she says. It was not until later in her career, after she had already become a professor, that she found mentors in Prof Nosisi Feza and Dr Norah Clarke, women who shaped how she leads and how she thinks about entrepreneurship. What she hopes the researchers she has mentored will carry forward is simple: “Being great mentors to others, sharing their own skills with a large audience, working with integrity, striving for excellence.”

Building the systems that keep women safe

Dr Tirhani Manganyi has spent more than two decades managing complex, multi-country development programmes across low- and middle-income countries—work that has put her at the centre of some of the region's most difficult conversations about gender-based violence. She currently serves as a Programme Manager for the GBVF Response Fund and previously managed the ‘What Works to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls' global flagship programme, funded by the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.

Rather than one programme or one community, she focuses on the partnerships, organisations, and systems that determine whether women and girls are protected in the first place, the policy frameworks, the funding structures, and the institutional coordination that either holds under pressure or does not. It is slow, unglamorous work, largely invisible to the people it eventually protects. But systems built well outlast any single crisis they were designed to answer.

Building dignity into the healthcare system

As Director of Nursing at Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital, Matron Aziwimbavhi Tshitereke has spent her career asking a question most healthcare systems do not ask often enough: what does it take to safeguard patient dignity? Her focus has been the integration of palliative care into routine public healthcare, not as a specialist add-on, but as a standard part of how patients and their families are treated at every stage of the healthcare journey.

Her contributions extend into clinical research as well as clinical practice; she has helped shape and contribute to published studies examining the real barriers and enablers to bringing palliative care into South Africa's public hospitals. Tshitereke says, “Working in public healthcare presents profound challenges, but it is precisely here that integrated palliative care matters most.” “We must build robust systems that support both our patients and our staff, ensuring that deep compassion is just as accessible as clinical treatment.”

On the surface, these women work in unconnected fields. But a closer look reveals the same architecture in each: a woman who was given an opportunity, a mentor, or a moment of belief and chose to rebuild the system around her so the next person would not have to fight for it from scratch.

That is the real ambition behind Built to Be Shared. Not women who overcame their circumstances, but women who changed the conditions for everyone who comes after them. Because the most meaningful opportunities are not measured by the lives they change today. They are measured by the lives they continue changing tomorrow.