A Woman with a Voice Educates Thousands
From the mountains of Cameroon to Washington, DC, Lady Kate Ndi’s mission is to bring human rights awareness to America’s African diaspora and to Africa.
A Miss Africa USA pageant queen provided bicycles to children who travel miles to go to school in Guinea. Another pageant queen originally from South Africa, along with her volunteers, built 25 homeless shelters across the US. Yet another built a school in her native Cape Verde for underprivileged children.
These women all have one thing in common: Lady Kate Ndi taught them human rights.
Lady Kate grew up with a widowed mother and four siblings in Limbe, Cameroon—a country where nearly two-thirds of all girls never make it through the first years of secondary school. She watched her mother raise five children alone and still take a leading role in local women’s rights groups. “In these groups,” Lady Kate says, “women were able to be empowered to face life challenges by working together, sharing ideas and supporting each other.” The experience taught her valuable lessons: “I witnessed how women survived under very hard struggles through poverty to raise their children.”
Lady Kate traveled to the US in 2000 after completing university studies in London. There she learned of the nearly 16 million members of ethnic minorities living below the poverty line. Inspired by her mother, she saw an opportunity to advocate for change in her new home. “I always dream big and dream about impacting not only my family but also my community.”
Five years later, Lady Kate launched the Miss Africa USA pageant. “I wanted to inspire the young women growing up in the US with African backgrounds to embrace their uniqueness,” she says. What began as a small state pageant quickly grew into a national movement. Lady Kate not only developed a space in which African women living in America could shine, but as she says, “I use my platform for advocacy and to foster empowerment, to educate communities and to allow women to thrive and be their best. I believe if you empower a woman, you empower the nation.”
“I always dream big and dream about impacting not only my family but also my community.”
In 2013, Lady Kate attended a Black History Month event in Washington, DC, where she first encountered Youth for Human Rights and its educational materials. She implemented the program in her pageant, giving girls tools to bring human rights to themselves and others. “The ultimate experience for me,” she says, “has been to give young women a platform to become great advocates in their communities.”
She began giving lectures on human rights to students, communities and fellow nurses. She teamed up with her pageant winners and launched an essay contest in Cameroon and Nigeria to promote Article 26 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “The Right to Education.” The contest winner received an educational scholarship, and Lady Kate found a needed teaching moment. “This exercise opened my eyes to the void we have in this space among children in Africa, that they did not really know what their human rights are.”
After educating thousands about their human rights in the United States and through her pageant, Lady Kate decided to bring the curriculum to the schools of Cameroon. At the beginning of 2026, she traveled to her home country with a suitcase full of What Are Human Rights? booklets, T-shirts and educator packages. “There is need for everyone to understand their human rights and be empowered to know that they have a right to be the best of themselves.”
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