Sowing Seeds of Change: How Patience Shimadoo Ukange Is Rebuilding Communities Through Empowerment and Climate Action
- Vikrant Joshi
- May 6
- 5 min read
As displaced communities across Africa begin the long-awaited return to their ancestral lands, they do not walk alone. Among them walks a passionate changemaker, Patience Shimadoo Ukange, a Nigerian climate advocate, gender rights defender, and founder of The Confident Woman (TCW) Africa Initiative. Her voice echoes with a deep commitment to sustainability, equity, and a future where every girl, no matter where she is born, has the tools to lead, thrive, and heal the planet.
Through her grassroots organization, Patience is doing more than planting hope, she is cultivating legacies. Her work bridges the wide chasm between climate vulnerability and sustainable empowerment, particularly for women and girls in displaced and rural communities. With over 3,000 lives already transformed across Nigeria, Lesotho, Uganda, Kenya, and Ghana, Patience stands as a beacon of what it means to build back better, stronger, and greener.
Rising From Displacement: A New Chapter Begins
In communities long scarred by displacement, instability, and neglect, Patience is helping write a new story, one of restoration and resilience. Her focus is clear: ensure that those returning home are not just rebuilding houses, but entire futures rooted in dignity, opportunity, and environmental consciousness.
"Empowerment is not a luxury; it’s a right. And for every girl in a rural village, it’s the bridge between survival and significance," Patience says.
This principle is woven into every aspect of TCW Africa’s mission, which combines education, skills development, leadership training, and climate action in a powerful blend that uplifts the most vulnerable.
The Birth of a Movement: Why It Matters Now
Patience’s path to becoming a leading voice in climate and gender justice was shaped by a convergence of personal passion and professional insight. With a background in environmental studies and geospatial research, including a standout academic project on monitoring rubber tree growth through satellite techniques, she quickly recognized the critical connection between climate data and human development.
Her ground-level work with The Confident Woman Africa brought her face to face with the stark realities of climate change. From prolonged droughts and erratic rainfall to failing crops and rising health risks, the impacts of environmental degradation were especially harsh for rural women. Many depend on agriculture and informal trading, sectors now crippled by soil infertility and uncertain harvests. The ripple effects extend into homes, schools, and entire communities, with girls often dropping out of school due to deepening poverty.
"Climate change is not just an environmental issue, it’s a developmental crisis that is stealing futures," Patience asserts. “When we empower women and girls to become environmental stewards, we’re not only protecting the planet, we’re securing their future.”
The Projects Powering the Revolution
At the heart of TCW Africa’s efforts are three standout initiatives, each addressing a different layer of the gender-climate nexus while reaching into the heart of displaced and rural populations:
1. The HerRise Project
Targeting girls aged 16–21 in rural communities and internally displaced persons (IDP) camps, HerRise is about rewriting destinies. These girls, often held back by socio-economic barriers, early marriage, or lack of educational access, are provided with mentorship, digital literacy, financial education, and leadership training.
With over 2,000 young women already reached, the HerRise Project is proving that where education thrives, poverty retreats.
2. EmpowerHer: Skill Development Project
This project tackles one of Nigeria’s deepest structural issues: poverty among rural women. With 40.1% of Nigerians living below the poverty line, and women accounting for more than 60% of that figure the need is urgent.
EmpowerHer addresses this through vocational training, startup support, and mindset reorientation, specifically for widows, gender-based violence survivors, and victims of early marriage. With 300+ women empowered in just four communities, this initiative is cultivating resilience and self-sufficiency.
3. EmpowerHer: Climate Action Project
Perhaps the most visionary of TCW Africa’s efforts, this project builds climate literacy among girls aged 10–21. Designed specifically for displaced and rural communities, it aims to raise a generation of climate champions who understand sustainability, embrace conservation, and lead locally relevant climate solutions.
With workshops, mentorship, and community-led projects, the goal is not just awareness but agency.
“We are raising confident women not just to break cycles but to build legacies of leadership, resilience, and change,” says Patience.
Recognition That Reflects Impact
Patience’s impact has not gone unnoticed. She is a recipient of the 2025 Bold Pitch Winner of the Visionary Compass Accelerator Program and was named the 2022 Most Outspoken Female Corps Member in Lafia, Nigeria. Her participation in globally renowned programs, including the Vital Voices Visionary Leadership Program, Aspire Leaders Program, Shifters 100 Academy, and United People Global Sustainability Leadership, has expanded her reach and influence across borders.
As a Gender and Human Rights Officer, and active member of networks such as YOUNGO Climate Working Group, Forbes BLK, Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI), and Women in Surveying Nigeria, Patience stands as a multidimensional leader. Her ability to move seamlessly between grassroots engagement and global forums underscores her exceptional range.
Notably, her leadership also extends into thought authorship. Patience is the author of "Confessions of The Confident Woman", a self-help book offering guidance and motivation to women across age groups, and her growing digital community of 11,000+ followers on LinkedIn demonstrates the magnetic resonance of her message.
A Global Citizen with a Local Heart
Patience’s unique ability to see the global in the local and vice versa, is what makes her work so powerful. She does not believe in generic solutions. Instead, her approach is context-specific, deeply respectful of community wisdom, and rooted in practical empowerment.
Her international exposure, through conferences like the Gender and Inclusion Summit 2024 (Abuja) and Vital Voices Visionaries Summit 2024 (Washington DC), has sharpened her understanding of structural solutions, while her lived experiences keep her connected to the grassroots pulse.
Through TCW Africa’s partnerships with tech-forward organizations like Tech Herfrica, Girls in Tech Nigeria, and SkyVolt, she is integrating innovation with tradition. Vocational skills meet digital tools. Climate data meets village voices. Displacement meets hope.
Scaling a Movement, Not Just a Mission
The scale of Patience’s vision is staggering, but it is also deliberate. As Africa faces increasing displacement due to climate change, conflict, and economic pressures, the need for sustainable reintegration strategies becomes ever more urgent.
Her work offers a replicable model:
empower women and girls → integrate climate literacy → provide tools for economic independence → reinforce community leadership → foster environmental stewardship.
This chain reaction doesn’t just rebuild, it transforms. Patience’s goal is not only to uplift communities but to influence policy, shape education systems, and drive a continent-wide movement that sees young women as climate leaders, not climate victims.
Why This Story Matters
In a world increasingly defined by division and disruption, Patience Shimadoo Ukange reminds us of something profound: that the most powerful revolutions begin in the quiet resilience of forgotten places. In the determined eyes of a girl planting her first tree. In the steady hands of a widow learning to sew. In the shared laughter of a community returning home, not to rebuild what was, but to reimagine what could be.
"The hands that plant seeds of hope in rural Africa today will harvest forests of solutions for tomorrow’s world."
At Planet First Press, we are proud to spotlight changemakers like Patience who are not just changing the narrative but writing new chapters of hope, equity, and sustainability.
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