Los Angeles native Zuriel Oduwole is best known for her development work across the globe – advocating for girl’s education mostly across the African continent and the Caribbean region. In 2013, at the age of 10, she was profiled in Forbes Magazine and by 2015, she was listed among 33 women who had changed the world in ELLE Magazine. Calling her the world’s most powerful girl in January 2017, the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry honored her in Washington, D.C. at the State Department for her tireless work advocating against child marriages and speaking for girls’ education.
Zuriel has met one-on-one with over 36 world leaders (including Presidents and Prime Ministers) to address global social development and education challenges that children and teenagers face, and she has spoken directly to 56,430 youths in 23 countries about the power of a good education.
In March 2018, she met with President Filipe Nyusi of Mozambique to talk about girl marriage in his country and the significance of educating girls, showing herself as an example of why girls need to be in school instead of getting married young. A year later after that meeting and with the help of others, Mozambique formally and finally outlawed girl marriage in July 2019.
A simple but influential advisor who understands the effect of wars on girls and women, she mediates between conflicting countries at every opportunity, meeting first with President David Granger of Guyana in their impending conflict with Venezuela at the UN at the age of 13, and four years later, she sat down with President Abdel Fattah El Sisi in Egypt, during the Arab blockade of Qatar, that peacefully ended in 2021.
She was invited in December 2021 by the Qatar Foundation to share her radically new but powerful idea of reducing the number of out-of-school children worldwide, at their bi-annual WISE summit in Doha.
When she is not busy advocating, she can be seen teaching a basic filmmaking class, mostly to unemployed older girls and young women in Africa. To date, she has taught 540 people in eight countries, including Ghana, Cote D’ Ivoire, Mexico, Nigeria, Seychelles, and Ethiopia. Her work and story have been featured on many major global media networks, including BBC, CNBC, TRT London, CGTN, Bloomberg TV, and CNN, as well as in print titles Forbes Magazine, ELLE Magazine, and digitally on Yahoo! News.
On September 9th, 2022, the 8th Secretary General of the United Nations presented Zuriel Oduwole with the Ban Ki-Moon Leadership Award in New York, for her measurable and development work around the world over the last 10 years.
Zuriel Oduwole was nominated by professors from two U.S. institutions, a Senator, a member of the House, and the office of a Prime Minister for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. They recognized her 12 years of work in peace mediation, gender parity advocacy, education equity for girls, and skills transfer initiatives via filmmaking, since the age of nine.