Women Carry the World: A Tribute for International Women’s Day 2026

“Women have always been the ones who carried the world — not because they had to, but because they refused to let it fall. Every community that survived what should have destroyed it has a woman at the center of the circle. Every tradition that outlasted colonialism was kept alive in a grandmother’s hands.”

On International Women’s Day, we honor — but honoring without accountability becomes applause. This is not that. This is a reckoning with the labor women carry, an acknowledgment of the structures that make it heavier than it needs to be, and a commitment to the women whose names we speak every day because they carried something that would have disappeared if they had let it.

African Women Who Carried the World

They are not distant figures. They are the blueprint for what it means to hold something sacred when everything around you says to let it go.

Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba (Angola, 1583–1663) negotiated with Portuguese colonizers as an equal when no one believed she could, led military campaigns into her seventies, and kept her people from enslavement for decades. She did not survive by being gentle. She survived by being formidable and wise simultaneously — and by understanding that the community she protected was the purpose, not the crown.

Yaa Asantewaa (Ghana, 1840–1921) led the War of the Golden Stool when the male chiefs hesitated. “If you, the men of Ashanti, will not go forward, then we will,” she said. The British exiled her. The Ashanti kept her memory alive. She became the woman who named what the moment required and walked into it.

Wangari Maathai (Kenya, 1940–2011) gave Kenyan women trees and called it liberation — because she understood that the destruction of the forest was the destruction of community life, and that planting trees was an act of restoration that was also an act of resistance. She was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She used it to plant more trees.

Fannie Lou Hamer said “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired” in 1964 before a Democratic National Convention that tried to silence her. She said it on national television. She was a sharecropper who had been beaten, sterilized without consent, and threatened with death. She ran for Congress. She organized. She sang. She carried the Mississippi freedom movement on her back and called it ordinary work.

The Labor That Does Not Get Named

Women perform 76.2% of total hours of unpaid care work globally — cooking, childcare, elder care, emotional support, community organizing, the maintenance of relationships that hold societies together. This labor is called “informal.” It is called “voluntary.” These words mean: essential but uncompensated.

In sub-Saharan Africa, women produce 60 to 80 percent of the food. They own less than 20 percent of the land. Across the globe, women make up 70 percent of the health and social workforce. They deliver the care — and they are systematically paid less for it, excluded from the decisions about it, and credited last for what it produces.

This is not a natural arrangement. It is a colonial one — imposed, reinforced through law and custom, and maintained by economic systems designed to extract women’s labor without accounting for it. Many African traditions before colonialism held women as knowledge keepers, medicine holders, and political authorities. What was taken can be restored.

What Honoring Women Actually Requires

International Women’s Day can become a celebration of resilience in a way that obscures the structures producing the need for resilience in the first place. We do not honor women by admiring how much they endure. We honor them by working to change what they should not have to endure.

That means: equal land and property rights. Protection from gender-based violence as a policy commitment, not a proclamation. Political representation that is more than symbolic. Healthcare that includes reproductive autonomy. Economic structures that compensate care work. Education for girls without exception.

The women most celebrated in retrospect are often the ones the systems of their time worked hardest to suppress. We do not need to wait for retrospect. We can see them now. We can act now.

The Women of Ubuntu Village

In East Harlem and across our partner communities in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria, Ubuntu Village’s work runs through women. They are the community health workers who make house visits. The grandmothers raising grandchildren while managing their own health challenges. The mothers who stretch a food basket to feed more people than it was designed for. The organizers who know every family on the block and who to call when someone is in crisis.

In Ubuntu tradition, women are not support figures for a story centered on someone else. They are the knowledge holders, the ceremony keepers, the ones who initiate and who teach. When Ubuntu Village honors women today, we are honoring the people without whom this work would not exist — and committing to building structures worthy of what they carry.

Community is the medicine.

Ubuntu Village honors women not with words alone but with the work — programs, advocacy, and community care rooted in the African tradition that women have always led.

Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit rooted in East Harlem, New York, with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. A writer, advocate, and community strategist working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power, Michele leads Ubuntu Village’s work to center communities as the protagonists of their own healing. She writes from the conviction that science and spirit are complementary, that healing is relational, and that community is the medicine.