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HeforShe, a UN campaign that encourages men to speak up and take action on gender equality, last week embarked on a tour of 10 European universities as its global impact increases. Although it was popularised by Hollywood start Emma Watson who became the global face of HeForShe as it garnered over after an impassioned speech that took the Internet by storm generating over 1,2 billion conversations on social media, the brains behind the campaign is a Zimbabwean woman.

HeForShe director Elizabeth Nyamayaro, the mastermind behind the global movement is also the senior advisor to Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Head UN Women. She has a unique perspective about men’s roles. The tour dubbed #GetFree Uni Tour kicked off at Leicester, before heading to Paris’ Sciences Po, the London School of Economics and Nottingham, among others.

The Leicester campus saw a lecture hall filled with keen faces – about half of them male – to hear Elizabeth speak. She acknowledges that when the campaign, which has garnered the support of men from Matt Damon to Desmond Tutu, launched a year ago there was a lot of “trepidation and hesitation” about involving men in a battle traditionally owned by women.

“This is not about men saving women, or seeing women as helpless. We want to dismantle the patriarchy, but how can you achieve equality if you don’t engage with the men who are very often holding positions of power? It’s about solidarity, mobilising all of society,” she says.

With her campaign going viral, Elizabeth Nyamayaro has become yet another subject for the single narrative syndrome. Coming from a particularly disadvantaged background in Zimbabwe, Nyamayaro is now being used by the Western world to reinforce every negative perception of Zimbabwe and Africa.

The following except from one site, fastcompany.com says it all: “Impeccably dressed in a black trench-coat and shiny brogues, you could easily suppose that she was a lifelong New Yorker, but looks are deceiving: Nyamayaro spent her childhood in a village in Zimbabwe that was ravaged by both famine and HIV. Like other girls in her village, she didn’t go to school, instead spending her days tending to household chores and scrounging for food.

“When she was 10 years old, during a particularly devastating period of hunger, her family shipped her off to a nearby city to stay with an aunt who was better off, allowing her to attend school for the first time.

“Gender inequality was part of everyday life in Zimbabwe. Boys were given the opportunity to attend school, while girls were expected to stay at home. During the height of the AIDS crisis, men would unilaterally decide whether to use a condom in order to prevent their wives from being infected by the disease. Women were helpless if their husbands abused them or squandered money that the family should have spent on food.”

The article and many others deliberately ignore that one person’s experience does not write the history of a country or a continent. UN agencies in several studies have acknowledged that girls and boys have almost equal access to basic education with a variation of less than 2 percent being standard in all statistics.

In 2012 African Women’s Development Fund CEO Theo Sowa highlighted the problem of stereotyping on TEDxChange. “So why is it, that such a large population of women is overshadowed by a few?” she asked. She said there appeared to be a need in some corners to retain control of the African women.

“When people portray us as victims, they don’t want to ask us about solutions because people don’t ask victims for solutions. It’s a real issue that we need to take very seriously.”

But Elizabeth Nyamayaro seems to have risen above all these labels to prove that innovation, vision and solutions do not belong to any particular ethnic, or gender group. More than 20 years ago Nyamayaro left Zimbabwe for London with the sole intention to get a job at the United Nations to help people. After buying her ticket she only had enough money in her pocket to pay for a single month at a youth hostel.

“I was so naive,” she recalls. “When I arrived, I kept telling people that I was here to get a job at the UN and they laughed at me.” She worked in various range temporary jobs and acquired a degree then became an unpaid research intern at the UN before getting a full-time job then rising through the ranks to her current lofty heights.

While with the United Nations in Switzerland and the United States she realised that gender inequality was not a Zimbabwean or even African problem, but a global one. She zeroed in on issues like the gender wage gap, under-representation of women in top jobs and the number of women who fell out of the workforce after they had children.

She visualised HeforShe as she deduced that if men stopped thinking of themselves as a separate category from women, but realised that the entire economy could benefit from women’s empowerment, things around the world — from her village to the C-suites of big corporations — could change dramatically.

As this latest campaign takes off it is clear that Nyamayaro has managed to change mind sets across the world. Even the Leicester rugby club are on board. “I had my picture taken for it, we’ve been asked to get involved and we are. I’m not saying there is no sexism sometimes but we are really trying to get over that,” says club captain Harry Tillyer (20).

The club has got a social media policy, and a disciplinary procedure to tackle bad behaviour now, he adds. Bringing men into the heart of tackling gender equality has not been without controversy. Some in the women’s movement feared men would dominate debate, others scoffed at the idea of needing to be “rescued”.

One critic Roxane Gay, author of “Bad Feminist”, who shared the TEDWomen stage with Nyamayaro said, “It is ironic that women have been repeatedly kept out of male spaces – the workplace, for instance – and had to fight our way through everything. And yet, today, we’re warmly inviting men to be part of a movement that they should be supporting anyway.”

But for feminist students at Leicester, trying to recruit the other half of the world’s population for the fight against gender equality makes a lot of sense. “I think a lot of men hear the word feminism and think that it’s about putting men down to raise women up, but really it’s about the elevation of both sexes,” says Tyler John, a feminist and proud.

472 000 men have signed up since the campaign’s launch, while 10 business leaders including Unilever and Vodaphone have committed to taking action. The campaign also hopes to sign up 10 heads of state – the leaders of Japan, Indonesia and, of course, Sweden and Iceland are among them – but two places remain to be filled.

The French hotel company Accor has vowed to eliminate the pay gap for all its 180 000 employees by 2020 and create 50 000 male HeForShe leaders.

Unilever has promised to improve the safety of women in communities where it operates; for instance, the company has been advocating for women regarding sexual harassment issues for the 12 000 permanent workers and the 5 000 seasonal workers in its Kericho tea plantation in Kenya. PriceWaterHouseCoopers has developed a male-focused educational curriculum to share with the hundreds of thousands of students who participate in its university programme around the world.

Tupperware has vowed to achieve complete gender parity across the company, including all 14 of its factories, both in terms of hiring and pay. In Nyamayaro’s own village one man was so inspired by the campaign that he launched a “Husband School” in which he taught men who abused their wives to be better partners.

In Pune, India, a young man invited other men to cycle into villages to spread the message about how men had a valuable role to play in women’s empowerment. Thousands of letters come in from around the world every day from men who want to be part of the solution.

“We’ve found that we’ve tapped into something in men,” Nyamayaro says. – Theguardian.com/fastcompany.com/The Herald Review.