Changemakers: Vanessa Sanyauke

Ask Vanessa Sanyauke how she’s changing the world and her answer is quick: “One girl at a time,” she says with characteristic clarity.

It was while she was working for The Brokerage, a social mobility charity connecting young Londoners and employers, that she realised girls needed some extra help to get into the workplace – especially in traditionally male-dominated sectors such as finance, law and accounting.

“I noticed that when we were trying to engage young women they were opting out of those sectors – they were saying ‘I don’t really know if banking is for me’,

‘I don’t think law’s for me’, and they didn’t see that there was a place for them,” says Sanyauke, 32, who was born in north London to parents who had both emigrated from Zimbabwe and worked hard to build a new life in the UK.

Her parents made it clear they wanted her and her brother to have ‘proper’ professions such as medicine, law or accountancy, prompting Sanyauke to gain a degree in biomedical science (she decided against going on to become a doctor).

“I think I just sympathised with these girls,” she says. “I didn’t know about the opportunities available to me when I was growing up as I went down a path that my parents pushed me down, so I saw myself in these girls, and that’s what drove me to start what I started.”