The boarding school that Oprah built with Nelson Mandela is handing off its campus — but its promise to young women is far from over.
South Africa’s most storied boarding school for young women is entering a new phase, more than two decades after it first opened its doors. The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, known widely by its acronym OWLAG, is preparing to hand off its residential campus while insisting that its larger mission is nowhere near finished.
The school was born from a series of conversations between Oprah Winfrey and Nelson Mandela, and it grew into something rare: a fully funded, all-girls boarding academy designed to give promising young women from under-resourced communities a shot at an elite education, free of cost to them or their families. Since welcoming its first class in 2007, OWLAG has graduated more than 1,000 students. The overwhelming majority have gone on to university and built careers as doctors, lawyers, engineers, artists, executives and entrepreneurs, a track record that has made the campus something of a case study in what sustained investment in girls’ education can produce over the long run.
Andronica’s Journey From Campus To Meta
One of those graduates, Andronica, finished the program in 2012 and now serves as a senior engineering lead at Meta. She has described the campus as a place where every detail, down to the smallest gesture, reflected care for the students who lived there. For her, the experience reshaped what she believed mattered most for success, teaching her that preparation, character and purpose could matter more than the circumstances someone was born into.
Oprah’s Planned Handoff, Not A Shutdown
Once the 2027 academic year wraps, the residential campus itself will formally transition back to South Africa’s Gauteng Department of Education, fulfilling terms laid out in the original partnership agreement decades ago. That does not mean current students are left without support. Anyone still enrolled will finish their education with the same academic, financial and personal backing they have always had, even as the department steps in to steward the school’s day-to-day operations going forward.
Why OWLAG’s Mission Continues Beyond The Campus
Winfrey has framed the shift not as an ending but as an evolution. She has said the dream behind the academy lives on in every girl whose future is transformed through education, and that she is energized by the idea that this next phase could reach an even broader group of young women across South Africa, extending a promise she made more than 20 years ago.
The Ripple Effect Alumni Describe
That sense of expanding influence already shows up in the way graduates talk about their own lives. Kirsten, another alumna who has since become a CEO, has pointed to a kind of chain reaction: change one woman’s life, she has suggested, and she in turn changes the lives of her children and her broader community, setting off effects that extend well past any single classroom or campus.
What Comes Next For OWLAG
For now, OWLAG‘s leadership is treating the campus transition as a milestone rather than a finish line. The infrastructure that housed thousands of students over nearly 20 years may soon belong to a government ministry, but the philosophy behind it, that education can rewrite the trajectory of a young woman’s entire life, is expected to keep expanding outward. Supporters of the academy describe this moment as the start of a broader chapter, one focused less on a single address in Gauteng province and more on scaling the model that made the original campus so influential in the first place.
As OWLAG’s founders and alumni describe it, the work that began with one school and one promise is only getting started. If anything, supporters say, the transition strips away the idea that the mission was ever tied to a single building at all, reframing it instead as a movement built to outlast any one campus, class, or decade.
Source: Oprah Daily
