MAIN PHOTO: GLORIA PETERSEN, FOUNDER AND CEO OF MAKABELO FOUNDATION
LEN KALANE
In Roodepan, on the outskirts of Kimberley, there is a foundation that started the way most great movements do: with someone who refused to look away. Today, on Women’s Day (and Women’s Month) we celebrate Gloria Petersen — founder and CEO of the Makabelo Foundation — and the extraordinary body of work she has built in service of women and children across the Northern Cape and, increasingly, the country.
Gloria describes herself simply: a dynamic and motivated professional with a proven record of building relationships, managing projects from concept to completion, and coaching individuals toward success. But that plain description undersells what she has actually done. Since founding Makabelo in 2018, she has built one of the Northern Cape’s leading providers of social services — and, more importantly, she has given a generation of women and girls a reason to believe in their own worth.
From a School Visit to a National Mission
Makabelo’s story began with children. One of the foundation’s earliest landmark initiatives was a collaboration with the Northern Cape Department of Education to run a Back to School campaign, built around a theme that still guides the organisation today: “No child should go to school barefoot or with a torn uniform.” Gloria and her team visited communities across the province to identify learners in need, and — through the generosity of partners and donors — restored dignity to children who had been going without.
“While carrying out this work, I began to see a much deeper crisis affecting our communities.”
That is how Gloria describes the turning point. Behind the children she was helping were households shaped by poverty, unemployment, domestic violence and emotional trauma. She met women trapped in abusive relationships, carrying the economic weight of their families, with little room left to imagine anything beyond survival. It became clear, she says, that supporting children alone was not enough — the women holding those families together needed to be seen, equipped and protected too.
That realisation gave birth to the “I AM A WOMAN” Seminar Series — a campaign built around four pillars that now define Makabelo’s entire approach: Knowing Your Value, Embracing Equity, Mentorship, and Addressing Gender-Based Violence. The series launched in 2023 under the theme “Knowing Your Value” and, in Gloria’s words, resonated profoundly with its audience — enough to convince her this was not a once-off event, but the beginning of a movement.
Why It Matters
The scale of the need Gloria is responding to is sobering. Nationally, an estimated one in three women in South Africa will experience gender-based violence in her lifetime, and roughly 40% of girls lack basic school resources. The Makabelo Foundation identified the Northern Cape specifically as the region with the lowest national access to women’s empowerment programmes — a gap Gloria set out to close.
| 1 in 3 Women in SA affected by GBV | 40% Girls lacking basic school resources | R1.5M Fundraising potential unlock |
Grassroots Reach, National Ambition
What sets Gloria’s approach apart is its discipline: identify the constraint, run a pilot, and only then replicate it as a self-sustaining programme. Since 2018, that method has carried Makabelo from community upliftment work in its founding years, through a 2022 expansion into dedicated women and youth development, to the 2023 launch of the “I AM A WOMAN” campaign, and now a national activation across four provinces between 2024 and 2025.
On the ground, the seminar series curriculum covers leadership and self-worth, mentorship circles, GBV education, and career and skills development, carried by road from Upington to Kuruman, Kimberley and Johannesburg. Gloria and her team are now in the process of formalising partnership endorsements with the Free State, North West and Limpopo provinces — proof that a Northern Cape initiative is becoming a national one.
The 2026 operational calendar reflects that ambition: a Student Affairs Seminar in May that sold out at 200 guests and funded over 100 school packs, the “I Am A Woman” Awards in August, a Health and Fitness Day partnership with Virgin Active in September, and the campaign’s most solemn moment — the GBV 16 Days of Activism in November, featuring legal literacy workshops, a Men as Allies programme, and a Survivor Allies programme carried under the banner #IAmAWoman #EndGBV.
| 1,500+ Total participants projected | 100+ Women leaders to be trained | 50+ Mentors to be recruited |
Happy participants
A Leader Worth Celebrating
Gloria’s own objectives for Makabelo read like a personal creed as much as an organisational strategy: empower women to recognise and assert their worth, promote equity in access to opportunity, build a mentorship network connecting experienced women to the next generation, and combat gender-based violence by advocating for the safety and dignity of all women. She has not shied away from the harder, less glamorous issues either — from the lack of sanitary products that causes an estimated 100-plus girls in the Northern Cape to miss school every month, to the drug abuse that erodes whole communities.
“When you empower a woman, you empower a community.”
It is a line Gloria has made her own — and one she has spent nearly a decade proving true, one seminar, one scholarship, one rescued school year at a time. On a day set aside to honour women across South Africa, the Makabelo Foundation’s story is a reminder of what happens when one woman decides that dignity should not be optional for anyone.
To Gloria Petersen: thank you for seeing what others walked past, for turning heartbreak into a curriculum, and for building an institution that will keep empowering women long after any one seminar ends. Happy Women’s Day — you have every reason to be proud.
Makabelo Foundation | 107 Hamerkop Street, Roodepan, 8309 | g.p.makabelo@gmail.com | www.makabelo.co.za
