About

Megalyn Echikunwoke

Bio:

Megalyn Echikunwoke is a young actress living and working in Los Angeles.  She was born to a Nigerian father and an American mother.  Her full name is Ebubennem Megalyn Ann Echikunwoke.  She was raised on a Navajo Indian reservation until the age of fifteen, where she was discovered performing in a summer camp play and hence started a successful career in the entertainment industry.  After ten years she’s decided to spearhead W.E A.P.O. N with the intent of empowering women through education and the arts, starting in Nigeria and eventually branching out to many other developing African countries.

Her Message:

“I lost my father at a very young age to cancer, but his culture has been and will always be an important part of my life.  I am very proud of my Nigerian heritage and one of my many reasons for founding W.E.A.P.O.N was to ensure that I could spend more time in my father’s home and contribute in some way to his cultural legacy.  I believe that education is the first and most important step in bringing about muchneeded change to lift communities out of abjection.  Education for women and girls is an imperative weapon in the fight to raise quality of life and battle gender inequality.  When I had the honor of meeting Hajiya Turai Umara Yar’adua, the first lady of Nigeria in April of 09.  I asked her what were the biggest challenges Nigerian women and girls faced.  She told me that beyond a shadow of a doubt it was access to education. She confirmed the fact that how in an intensely male dominated society such as Nigeria, education provides a women with independence and the opportunity to provide a better life for her family and the tools to help build self reliant communities.  She assured me the need to support these women is critical and she is deeply committed to working with them to find sustainable solutions to accessing education.  I share equally in this commitment.  Through my organization I hope to ensure that the female victims of war, poverty, HIV/AIDS, or simple lack of local infrastructure throughout Africa have the same opportunities that I’ve been so blessed to have.”

Uzodinma Iweala

Bio:

Uzodinma was inspired to write about the issue of child soldiers after reading an article about the conflict in Sierra Leone while in high school and then, a few years later while he was president of the Africa students’ society at Harvard, meeting a former Ugandan child soldier whom he had invited to speak there.

Uzodinma graduated from Harvard University, where he was a Mellon Mays Scholar and received a number of prizes for his writing, including the Eager Prize, the Horman Prize, the Le Baron Briggs Prize, and the Hoopes Prize, awarded for outstanding undergraduate thesis.

Uzodinma is now a medical student at Columbia University.