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Winnie Byanyima
Uganda's first woman aeronautical engineer, using a UN post against the donors who pay for it.
The rise
Born on 13 January 1959 in Mbarara, daughter of a Democratic Party chairman, she read aeronautical engineering at Manchester — the first Ugandan woman to do so — took a master's at Cranfield and worked as a flight engineer for Uganda Airlines before joining the NRA in the bush war against Obote.
What they did
Ambassador to France, then a decade as MP for Mbarara Municipality and founder of the Forum for Women in Democracy. She ran Oxfam International from 2013 to 2019, whose Davos inequality reports made wealth concentration a political question, and has led UNAIDS since 2019. In May 2025, with US money gone, she announced a 54% cut to the secretariat.
The full picture
The Haiti misconduct revelations broke in February 2018, five years into her Oxfam tenure; the British affiliate stopped bidding for UK government money, which fell from £21.8m in 2017-18 to £231,000 in 2021-22. Her husband, opposition leader Kizza Besigye, has been held on treason charges since November 2024.
Why it matters
She uses an international post the way it is almost never used: to tell the pharmaceutical companies and Western governments who fund it that their terms on medicines are unacceptable.
“My urgent call is that lenacapavir must not become another breakthrough that goes out only after a decade to those who need it most.”