INTERVIEW David K Shields
PHOTOGRAPHY Stephan Cruickshank, Steven Dean, Erin Mullikin, Davina Jogi
From First Nations communities in Australia to wildlife rangers in Zimbabwe, from schools in South Africa to hospitals in Uganda – Dr Judith Neilson’s philanthropy on behalf of women and girls is one of the most quietly far-reaching of our time.
Photo: Erin Mullikin
Photo: Stephan Cruickshank
There is a conviction at the heart of Judith Neilson’s approach to the world that is at once simple and radical: that when a woman is supported – genuinely supported, with dignity and resource and opportunity – everything around her improves. Her children. Her household. Her community. Her future.
“If the woman is happy and has self-esteem,” she has said, “her children will grow up better and the husband will be more respectful.”
It sounds straightforward. But for the millions of women whose circumstances make this a distant prospect rather than a lived reality, it is anything but. And it is those women – the overlooked, the marginalised, the survivors – who sit at the centre of Neilson’s most poignant philanthropic work.
Photo: Steven Dean
Photo: Steven Dean
Closer to home: Australia
In Australia, Neilson has directed significant resources toward First Nations women, and toward women affected by domestic violence and abuse – with particular attention to indigenous, refugee, and rural communities whose access to services and support is often the most limited and the most precarious.
Her giving in this space is not transactional. It is structured around economic empowerment programmes, trauma-informed services, and educational initiatives designed to help women rebuild their lives – not simply recover from hardship, but move forward with agency, with opportunity, and with their cultural heritage intact. The emphasis is on community-led programmes: local solutions shaped by the people they serve, rather than imposed from outside.
This is a distinction that matters deeply to how Neilson thinks. She is not interested in dependency. She is interested in capacity.
Photo: Steven Dean
Photo: Erin Mullikin
The Brave Ones: Akashinga in Zimbabwe
Nowhere is that philosophy more vividly expressed than in the Akashinga programme – whose name, in the Shona language, means simply “The Brave Ones.”
Launched in 2017 with just 16 women – many of them survivors of gender-based violence or living with HIV/AIDS – Akashinga trains women from the most marginalised communities to become wildlife rangers, protecting Zimbabwe’s natural ecosystems. Thanks in significant part to Neilson’s contributions, the programme has grown dramatically. Akashinga now oversees the protection of 3.7 million hectares across Zimbabwe and beyond, with an ambition to expand that reach to 12 million hectares by 2030.
But Akashinga is more than a conservation programme. It is a model of what happens when you invest in women who have been written off. The rangers bring with them lived knowledge of the land and communities they protect. And Neilson’s support extends beyond the programme itself to local infrastructure improvements – healthcare, clean water systems, education – that benefit the wider communities in which these women live and work. The philosophy woven through all of it is the blending of environmental protection with social upliftment, and the understanding that the two are not in competition but in concert. The model has since influenced conservation strategy across Southern Africa, and similar programmes are now being established in Tanzania and Mozambique.
Photo: Erin Mullikin
Photo: Erin Mullikin
Uganda: feeding those the system has left behind
Further north on the continent, Neilson’s work in Uganda addresses a challenge that is both practical and harrowing in its implications. In regions where hospitalised individuals rely on their families to bring them food – because hospitals simply lack the funding to feed their patients – her support teaches women how to grow and cook food in their communities, directly addressing critical nutrition needs where they are most acute.
Supported through partnerships including World Vision Australia, these initiatives place particular emphasis on maternal and child nutrition, and specifically on the first 1,000 days of a child’s life – a window recognised by health experts as foundational for long-term development. By integrating nutritional education with better access to food resources, the aim is not emergency relief but the building of healthier generational foundations.
Photo: Steven Dean
Photo: Steven Dean
Education as the long game: Masi High School and beyond
Across Southern Africa, Neilson has also invested deeply in education as the surest mechanism for breaking cycles of disadvantage. As benefactor of Masi High School, and through a long-standing partnership with Vince van der Bijl – a former South African cricketer turned education advocate – she has helped ensure that quality education reaches children in poverty who might otherwise have no access to it.
What she and van der Bijl share is a belief that structured opportunity changes the internal calculus of what a young person believes is possible for themselves. The goal, in both their views, is not to rescue people from without, but to equip them to shape their own futures from within. That distinction – supporting projects that allow people to build their own successes rather than relying on outside aid – runs through everything Neilson does.
Photo: Stephan Cruickshank
Photo: Stephan Cruickshank
The reach keeps extending
Her footprint across Africa is, by any measure, extraordinary. In Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Malawi, and beyond, Neilson’s partnerships continue to address the intersecting challenges of health, education, food security, and opportunity. In Malawi, a partnership with Save the Children has expanded a school-based malaria diagnosis and treatment programme that now covers 150 schools and benefits 220,000 students – improving both health outcomes and school attendance in a single intervention.
That figure – 220,000 students – is worth sitting with. It represents the scale that targeted, sustained, and thoughtfully structured philanthropy can achieve when it is driven not by a desire for recognition, but by a genuine understanding of what is needed, and by whom.
Photo: Steven Dean
Photo: Steven Dean
What it all means
Women, Neilson understands, are often the first to suffer in times of instability and the last to benefit in times of progress. Her life’s work is, in many ways, a sustained refusal to accept that as inevitable.
Through grants, partnerships, community infrastructure, educational access, and conservation programmes that double as pathways to economic independence, she has amplified the voices of women working at the grassroots level – and created spaces where they can not only survive, but lead.
Photo: Erin Mullikin
This is the second of three posts introducing Dr Judith Neilson’s philanthropic work. The full picture in her own words – across women’s empowerment, journalistic integrity, and art – is in her rare extended interview, published in Resolve, Issue 3 of It’s Interval. It is a conversation well worth your time.
Featured in It’s Interval RESOLVE – view full story and more from this issue!