Rebeca Gyumi, a thirty-one year old women of Tanzania, recieved the 2018 Human Rights Prize, awarded annually by the United Nations. Rebeca has been involved in specifically women’s rights from a young age, witnessing many of her classmates drop out of school due to pregnancy at as young as thirteen and married off to men double their age. She took notice that the legal age for men to marry was eighteen, whereas girls were practically sold into wifehood as young as fourteen. Then, at thirteen, is when Rebeca began to take notice of the injustice around her, and vowed to do everything she could to combat it. At the age of twenty Rebeca began volunteering at the youth initiative. It was here that she realized that the discrimination was not just a local issue plaguing her hometown of Dodoma, but a national issue of which she hoped to fight head on. Advancing through law school, Rebeca began her first battle– taking down the 1971 Law of Marriage Act. Successfully getting sections of this law deemed unconstitutional was a huge win not only for Rebeca, but for all Tanzanian girls and young women who had suffered under it for decades. Not everyone agreed with the overturn of the law however. Many Tanzanians saw this ruling as an effort to “westernize” Tanzanian culture and change the traditions that they had lived by for centuries. These people attempted to undermine Rebeca’s success and fight the feminist changes she was bringing to the country. However she did not let these critics slow her down, as she went on to start a foundation advocating for the education of young girls, win the UNICEF Global Goal Award, and be named the 2016 Woman of the Year by New Africa Magazine. Now, with the UN’s Human Rights Prize added to the list, Rebeca has become an inspiration to young women globally, not just in Tanzania. Her ability and williningness to push boundaries prove that it can and must be done in other nations around the world, and that the efforts of human rights advocates will not go unnoticed no matter how young– or what gender– they might be.
