Biography
About Racheal
Scholar-activist, author, educator, and advocate for African women's and girls' leadership rights.
Dr Racheal Kalaba, PhD · Photo by Jacob’s Photography
Dr Racheal Kalaba is a scholar-activist, author, and educator whose work spans Ubuntu philosophy, African Indigenous knowledge systems, and girls' and women's leadership across Africa and the diaspora. She named and theorised Ubuntu Womanism, a framework that provides scholarly language for the leadership African women have long practised.
She is the founder and CEO of the Zambia Women Institute of Leadership and Learning (ZAMWILL), which since 2017 has delivered Ubuntu-centred leadership programmes for women and adolescent girls in Zambia, and founder and CEO of the AfricaWILL Foundation in Canada.
She holds a PhD in Adult Education and Community Development from OISE, University of Toronto, and was a 2025 Echidna Global Scholar at the Brookings Institution. Her monograph Ubuntu and the Power of African Women’s Leadership: She Leads Because We Are is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan.
As founder and CEO of ZAMWILL and AfricaWILL Foundation, Racheal translates scholarship into tangible socioeconomic change. Her Girls Hackathon initiative and Ubuntu-centred leadership programmes have reached communities across rural Zambia, connecting technology rights, digital literacy, and women's self-determination.
A 2025 Echidna Global Scholar at the Brookings Institution and a 2026 Senior Research Fellow at the Teyeni Centre for Sport Research in Zambia, Racheal brings a rare combination of rigorous scholarship, international programme leadership, and grassroots community building to every space she occupies. She is one of Canada's Top 100 Black Women to Watch (2023).
Her teaching and mentorship spans undergraduate and graduate seminars at OISE on Ubuntu Womanism, Indigenous knowledge systems, socioeconomic rights, and decolonial methodologies, as well as community learning circles through ZAMWILL and AfricaWILL Foundation integrating gender justice, Indigenous epistemologies, and digital literacy for women and girls in Zambia.
