The Woman Who Refused to Be Invisible
Stella Nkhonya was born in a remote village in northern Malawi, in a community where patriarchy was deeply rooted and disability was seen as a curse. At seven years old, a sudden illness left her unable to walk or use her hands. Doctors later confirmed it was polio. After a year, she regained the use of her hands. She has used crutches and calipers ever since.
Her family could have kept her home. Many in her village believed educating a girl with disabilities was pointless. Her own aunt tried to convince her mother not to bother. But her father, a primary school teacher, refused to accept that. He sent Stella to mainstream school and encouraged her every step of the way. She repaid that faith by finishing at the top of her class and going on to graduate at college level.
She holds a degree in Community Development – a foundation that sharpened her understanding of the real issues facing women and girls with disabilities in their communities.
She later earned a Master’s degree in Information Systems. That combination matters: with women and girls making up the bulk of the 2.6 billion people still offline worldwide, Stella brings a disability and gender lens to how technology either opens or closes doors for the most excluded.
That foundation of self-belief became the cornerstone of everything she would later build.
A Life That Built an Activist
Stella did not set out to become an activist. She entered the workforce like anyone else, in government. But she quickly saw that her qualifications counted for less than those of her non-disabled colleagues. She was paid less. She was given a bare room to work in. Nobody believed she could perform.
Then came harder blows. When her first husband’s family decided she was not fit to be a wife – because she could not draw water from the river or fetch firewood – they pushed him to leave her. He did. That experience, and the way a nurse at an antenatal clinic once treated her with pity and contempt, hardened her resolve. She stopped waiting for the world to change and decided to change it herself.
“Change comes from within,” she says. “If you do not believe in yourself, no one will. Change starts with us.”
Building WAG Disability Rights from Nothing
In 2015, Stella founded what would become WAG Disability Rights – the Human Rights of Women and Girls with Disabilities in Malawi. She left paid employment to do it. There was no funding, no office, no guarantee of anything. She describes it as the hardest decision of her life.
The name of the organisation reflects its purpose precisely. Women and girls with disabilities in Malawi face what Stella calls “double trouble.” Society already marginalises women. Add a disability, and the barriers multiply. Women with disabilities are seen as unfit to marry, unfit to mother children, unfit to make decisions about their own bodies. Some are sterilised without their consent. Others are denied basic healthcare. Many are trapped in poverty, with no income and no path to independence.
WAG was built to change all of that.
Growing an Organisation, Growing a Movement
From those earliest days with no resources, Stella has grown WAG into one of Malawi’s most respected disability rights organisations. Membership has grown to over 1,000 women and girls with disabilities. The programmes she has built touch nearly every aspect of their lives.
WAG’s economic empowerment work stands out as a particular achievement. Through village savings and loans groups, women with disabilities are able to pool money, borrow at interest, and build small businesses. After six months, they share profits and reinvest. Stella describes this with clear satisfaction: it has moved women and girls with disabilities off the streets and into financial independence. The organisation trains them in basic business skills so they can calculate profit and loss and grow what they start.
WAG also runs literacy training, human rights education, and sexual and reproductive health programmes. It trains local chiefs, health workers, and frontline service providers to treat women with disabilities with respect and dignity. A weekly radio show with national reach has brought WAG’s message into homes across Malawi – making clear that women with disabilities have every right to relationships, to reproductive choices, and to live on their own terms.
Impact at Community, National and International Level
The change Stella has helped create is visible at every level.
In communities across Malawi, women with disabilities report that local health clinics are becoming more responsive to their needs. One village launched its own weekly antenatal classes for women with disabilities – a direct result of WAG’s advocacy. Parents who once kept their daughters with disabilities at home have started sending them to school. The number of rape cases in communities where WAG works has fallen, as awareness campaigns have challenged the deeply harmful myth that sex with a woman with disabilities could cure HIV.
At the national level, Stella’s advocacy helped push for the passage of Malawi’s Disability Act. She and her colleagues worked alongside other organisations to ensure the legislation was signed into law, and WAG has continued to advocate for its full implementation – including better access to justice and public services for people with disabilities. Women with disabilities who came through WAG’s programmes are now sitting on government committees, shaping policy on violence against women, HIV and AIDS, and healthcare.
Her influence now reaches far beyond WAG’s programmes. She sits on the Steering Committee of a World Bank project – one of only two women among thirteen members and the only woman with a disability at that table.
She chairs the Finance Subcommittee of the Malawi Council for Disability Affairs (MACODA).
She serves on the board of the Malawi Health Equality Network (MHEN).
She is a member of the UN Women Civil Society Advisory Group for Malawi.
And she represents women with disabilities on the International Committee on Climate Change in Africa to ensure that disability and gender are not an afterthought when the continent plans for a changing climate.
Through partnerships forged at events such as the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) Forum in Brazil, Stella connected WAG with funders and allies across Africa and beyond. Members from Zambia, Algeria, Nigeria, and other countries joined the network. Funders including Mama Cash, the Disability Rights Fund, the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF), and Kynnys ry in Finland have all supported the organisation’s work. WAG is now implementing funded projects, including the EmpowerHer programme and the Pamodzi Kuthetsa Nkhaza (PKN) project, the latter in partnership with FCDO.
A Leader Who Leads by Example
What sets Stella apart is not just what she has built, but how she has built it. She leads from personal experience, and she makes that experience visible. She remarried – a large, celebrated wedding that her community talked about for a long time – and speaks openly about what that meant for other women with disabilities watching. Parents of girls with disabilities who attended her wedding left with a different picture of what their daughters’ lives could look like.
Her eldest daughter volunteers at WAG during university holidays, working alongside girls with disabilities and telling them: “My mum is my role model.” That cycle of inspiration, from Stella’s own father to Stella herself to the next generation, is the clearest sign of what sustained, values-led leadership can do.
Those who oppose her work have called her stubborn. She wears the label without apology. Perseverance, endurance, tolerance, focus, and what she calls “aggressiveness in a positive way” are the qualities she credits for her success. She has faced discrimination in the workplace, the breakdown of a marriage, poverty, and social exclusion – and turned each of those experiences into fuel.
In the community where she once had no role models, she is now one herself.
Stella Nkhonya is the National Coordinator and Executive Director of WAG Disability Rights, based in Lilongwe, Malawi. WAG can be reached at contact@wagdisability.org or wagdr34@gmail.com or via wagdisability.org.–
