Our Founder

Her Story

Priscilla was raised in Botswana, where her father served as a District Commissioner working with remote tribes of the Kalahari. Growing up there, she watched well-meaning colonial-model interventions fall apart again and again once the source of aid moved on – a lesson that would shape everything she built later in life.

In the 1980s, Priscilla joined a hunger strike in Kenya alongside Wangari Maathai and a group of women protesting the imprisonment of their sons without trial. She returned to Kenya in 2000, this time as a journalist researching an article on African women for The Telegraph. Wangari brought her into the slums to meet grassroots women who had rejected imposed systems in favour of their own, self-directed ways of supporting their communities.

That encounter sent Priscilla deeper into South Africa’s remote rural areas, where she uncovered the vast, largely invisible network of women serving as the true front line of the AIDS pandemic and the primary support system for a generation of orphaned and vulnerable children. She was struck, again and again, by how much these women had mobilised with so little. She came to believe that grassroots, women-led groups were the real entry point into these communities, echoing E.F. Schumacher’s idea of “smallness within bigness”: that investing in people, not systems, is the foundation of sustainable change.

Priscilla founded ASAP to listen to proactive women already doing this work in their own communities, and to fund the solutions they had already figured out for themselves. The aim was never to arrive with answers. It was to make women self-reliant through their own knowledge and their own methods.

She travelled these roads alone for years before ASAP became what it is today, unafraid, learning from the people she met. Long after she stepped back from active fieldwork, she remained deeply involved, advising ASAP’s board, raising funds, and carrying the organisation’s story to rooms far from the villages where it began.

Remembered by the Women Who Worked Beside Her

Alice Klaas, coordinator and friend, worked alongside Priscilla for years at ASAP. She shared this in August 2025:

“I remember meeting Scilla for the first time, at Nkau village. She was travelling alone. She was not afraid. I liked her character, her bravery. We started chatting about the community — I think we clicked.”

“Back then, HIV and AIDS… it was sad. People were dying, leaving children behind. We helped children who were abused, children who were orphaned. ASAP saw to it that they went to school, were clothed, fed. That the families could get documents and grants, grow vegetables, so they were no longer starving.”

“I told Priscilla that there were grandmothers looking after orphans, caring for the sick, voluntarily, and that I thought those people needed to be helped. Priscilla just said, ‘Yes, we will help.'”

“The children were very close to Scilla’s heart. If children were abused, we didn’t leave that lying – it had to be sorted out, and we did it. And if it was to be done, it had to be done the right way. She couldn’t just bend. No, she wasn’t that type of woman.”

“I cannot measure it, the things we did together. I can write a book, really.”

“I remember something that still makes me smile — if Priscilla was driving along these roads, she would not go past without people waving and the kids shouting. We loved Priscilla. She was one of us.”

Sue Crewe, February 2021:

“There are a few exceptional people who have such courage, charisma, vision and empathy that they can make a positive difference in the world. Priscilla Higham is one such person. Turning her back on a stimulating literary life in New York, she spent two decades helping the orphans and vulnerable children of South Africa – travelling alone at first to find out what was needed, then setting about finding the solutions. Her example and spirit will forever lead the way.”

ASAP: 21 Years, By the Numbers

Reaching people living in poverty in South Africa’s poorest rural areas – empowering proactive women to identify their own problems, improve their own lives, transform their communities, and bring hope to orphans and vulnerable children.

• Basic needs and human rights met for over 20,000 orphans and vulnerable children: birth certificates and ID documents, nutrition, shelter, access to education and healthcare, safety from abuse, and support recovering from trauma
• 23 Community Based Organisations (CBOs) supported to address home-based care, HIV, human rights, access to government services, and gender-based violence
• 36 Drop-In centres supported as places of safety and opportunity for women and children
• Food gardens and 8 large market farm enterprises developed to improve food security, health, self-employment, and livelihoods
• Strong networks of support built between communities, non-profit partners, and government

Winner, iF Social Impact Prize, 2023

Her Legacy Continues

Priscilla walked alongside rural women in the places that hope forgot, empowering them to transform their communities and ensure that even the most vulnerable children could thrive.

The work she began is vast, and it is far from finished. We still need your help to carry it forward.

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Thank you for being a part of her legacy.