This Women’s Month we recognise and celebrate our very own “mbokodo”, Teresa H. Clarke as in May of 2026, South Africa formally recognised her nearly three decades building opportunity for South African women and men alike. Teresa Clarke, Co-Founder of the Student Sponsorship Programme, was awarded the Order of the Companions of O.R. Tambo, Silver, by President Cyril Ramaphosa at an official ceremony in Pretoria.

The Order of the Companions of O.R. Tambo is one of South Africa’s highest national honours, reserved for foreign nationals who have made an exceptional contribution to the country’s freedom, democracy, justice, and human dignity. Clarke’s citation recognised her work across four areas of national life: education, media, access to justice, and the arts — a fitting summary of a career that has, at its centre, always come back to expanding access for those who might otherwise be locked out of it.

It is a distinction shared by a small and remarkable group of Americans before her, including Martin Luther King Jr., Harry Belafonte, and Jesse Jackson — recipients whose work, like Clarke’s, was defined by solidarity with South Africa.

For the SSP family, the honour lands close to home. In 2000, Clarke together with co-founder Nyagaka Ongeri — set out to do something simple to describe and hard to execute: identify academically gifted learners from under-resourced communities and open the doors of South Africa’s leading high schools to them. Twenty-six years later, that idea has grown into a five-year scholarship model that has walked more than 1,500 scholars through some of the country’s top schools and into leadership roles across business, law, medicine, the arts, and public life.

“To receive this recognition from South Africa is an honor I hold deeply,” Clarke said.

Beyond SSP, Clarke chairs the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and the Friends of the Legal Resources Centre of South Africa, and serves as Chair and Executive Editor of

Africa.com — each role a different expression of the same underlying belief: that talent is everywhere, and opportunity should be too.

This Women’s Month, that belief is easy to see in the women who have come through SSP’s own doors — scholars and alumni building careers their families once thought impossible.Two of them share their stories.