Growing up in a rural village near the Rwanda-Uganda border, Ritah Ashaba always knew she wanted to pursue an education. “I had something in me telling me I want to spend my life somewhere [I could only reach via higher education],” she explains.

Due to a lack of alternatives, young women in Ritah’s community often turn to early marriage, even when the quality of the relationship is questionable. “When girls get problems, all they look at is going to be married and starting a family so they can have food and shelter,” Ritah explains. “But me? I was like, ‘No!’ I had dreams as well.”

So she took a drastic step. At the age of just 14, shortly after losing her father, she headed for Kampala, Uganda in search of work that could fund her high school education. She had no idea what she would do for work or where she would stay. Thankfully, she found a job as a live-in housemaid that paid $20 per month. When that job fell through, she was briefly left on the street with nowhere to go. Still, she kept going.

She scraped together money via low-paying jobs and somehow managed to graduate high school while working close to full-time hours. More than just graduate, she excelled, finishing near the top of her class.

She was tantalizingly close to attending university, which would help lift her and her family out of poverty. But she feared her hard work would ultimately prove pointless. “I was told that university is too expensive even if I was working,” Ritah recalls. “To be honest, I didn’t have hope for university.”

She shifted her hopes to her younger siblings. Perhaps they would be the ones to make it to university. She endured a series of grueling jobs after high school in her efforts to fund her younger siblings’ education. In a seven day per week position at a computer store, she developed eye strain from dealing with computers all day. When she missed work to attend an eye doctor’s appointment, she was immediately fired. Against her mother’s wishes, she began to consider dubious, “get-rich-quick” job opportunities in the Middle East, which are often thinly-veiled human trafficking schemes. Looking back, she can’t help but shudder at how vulnerable she was. “I was too exposed when I was going through those things,” she says.

In the meantime, she held out hope that something could work out for her education. Scholarship opportunities came and went. She lost out in the final round of one major scholarship. She was granted a different scholarship, but a corrupt official demanded she pay a bribe that she could not afford, forcing her to withdraw her name from consideration. Finally, her breakthrough came via Meto’s scholarship program, when she received a full scholarship to ALU.

ALU has proven to be a perfect fit in every way. On-campus job opportunities pay far more than Ritah’s previous jobs in Kampala. At long last, she can comfortably provide for herself and her family’s financial needs. “I’m so grateful that ALU has given me an opportunity to work for them,” she explains. “I work as a residential coordinator in a paid internship. I’m so proud that they give me accommodation where I am. I’m able to have wifi, water, electricity, everything. I’m really so grateful… With my stipend, I can save some of it and it becomes tuition for my other siblings.”

Having taken care of herself and her family financially, Ritah can finally focus on the education she always dreamed about. She is majoring in Global Challenges, a unique program at ALU that uses an interdisciplinary lens to equip students to address the most pressing problems facing Africa and the world. “When we graduate, we have a mission to help big global challenges,” Ritah explains.