I've always known that I wanted to study at Oxford but it just felt like one of those far-fetched dreams that you have at the back of your mind that like would never come true. I'm a single mom and I was working two jobs, life was really, really full-on. How am I gonna move countries? How am I going to manage a full-time mba? I saw that there was a new scholarship being launched specifically for women leaders. The description was: you need to have a passion to empower women and have a dream to perhaps become an executive somewhere, and I was like 'that sounds like me'. The Laidlaw Scholarship is, it's empowerment right, the scholarship empowers women like me who ordinarily couldn't have afforded an education like this one to help us come here and achieve every dream you have in your mind that you thought was impossible. Without these types of opportunities and the opportunities to not have to worry about funding and focus on your education, I wouldn't be here. It really gave me like, I mean network seems like the wrong term, really like a sisterhood of women. Fifty percent of the world is female and if men continue to occupy positions of power and making decisions on behalf of women, we will never reach a society where problems are solved properly. You need more women at the top right and the truth is there are certain things that help you rise to the top and one of them honestly is a business degree like this one. The Oxford MBA actually has one of the highest women participation rates of all MBAs and I think the scholarship helps to do that.

Recently Laidlaw launched a fund for the scholars, it's a 50 million pound fund and it invests in businesses started by the scholars. I think that is amazing because across the globe women struggle to get funding from banks for business ventures they'd want to start. The MBA here is the perfect combination of business and impact. It doesn't talk about business in isolation it talks about how it has a bigger role to play in society. Being able to represent myself, my family, my country, my continent and help other people come up and do the same thing and that is really the essence of the scholarship - to make people know that they can do things like this, you know, because they've seen people like me. The first thing that we usually do is disqualify ourselves because we think 'oh my gosh that's Oxford, I will never make it in there'. Try it, apply, take a leap of faith. Impostor syndrome is something that affects a lot of people but I would say that, you know, believe in yourself. Go for it and just put your best foot forward.