The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Nyamayaro, Elizabeth. I Am a Girl from Africa. Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Chapter 1 opens onto a dire situation. Elizabeth Nyamayaro is eight years old and starving to death. Her Gogo (grandmother) has left her for five days with boiled maize to eat, but the food has now run out. A girl in a blue uniform (the uniform of the United Nations) rescues her by offering porridge and cool water. From this moment on, Nyamayaro decides that she wants to work for the United Nations to bring hope to those who suffer. Chapters 2 and 3 move back and forth throughout Nyamayaro's lifetime, but they center upon her arrival in London when she is twenty-five years old. Finding a job proves difficult, and Nyamayaro tries hard not to be discouraged by the small and dirty youth hostel that has become her new home.

Her goal in Chapters 4-6 is to survive heartbreak, for the narrative shifts back in time again to the moment that her Amai (mother) arrives to take her away from Gogo. Nyamayaro has assumed that Gogo was her mother, but she did not realize that Amai had left her with her grandmother because she was not married and could not afford to feed her daughter. Unfortunately, another famine has taken hold in Goromonzi, and now Gogo cannot afford to feed her grandchild. Nyamayaro travels with her mother to Epworth where she meets her other siblings and attends school for the first time. Soon, she learns how to take care of the house and her siblings while Amai is away all day looking for money. Just when Nyamayaro feels that she has become used to life in Epworth, her mother packs her up again so that she may move in with Uncle Sam and Aunt Jane in the larger city of Harare. Here, she will attend the prestigious Admiral Tait Primary School. At first, Nyamayaro is disoriented and behind in her schoolwork. She misses Amai and Gogo, but Uncle Sam is especially kind to her and even tutors her in English in the evenings. Her schoolwork improves greatly.

Chapters 7-9 detail Nyamayaro's time as a burgeoning researcher and assistant for an HIV/AIDS project chaired by Dr. Julia Cleeves. Nyamayaro had to beg Dr. Cleeves for the job, and she is working as an unpaid intern, but she is gaining valuable experience as she demonstrates to Dr. Cleeves that she is ready to take on other projects around the world. Dr. Cheeves is so pleased with her work that she sends her to Ethiopia on a HIV/AIDS project and then later to Uganda on a project deep in the jungle to distribute ivermectin, the medicine that cures river blindness. Nyamayaro continues to travel the world in Chapters 10-12 to ease the suffering of the impoverished. In Tbilisi (the Republic of Georgia), she comforts women who have not had access to healthcare and thus have lost babies and other family members. She continues to advocate for wider health care access in Zambia as well. Soon, her focus shifts to issues of gender equity, and she designs the HeForShe project to push for greater opportunities for women and girls. This project is unique because it harnesses the power of both men and women in order to work for change.

Chapters 13-17 document the achievements of the HeForShe initiative. In Iceland, the administration is only a step away from mandating equal pay for equal work, and in Malawi, the president is working hard to make child marriage illegal. In South Africa, the inhabitants of a town called Klerksdorp have established HeForShe taverns as safe places for women and men to discuss issues of gender violence. In Chapter 17, Nyamayaro's phone rings. A writer with the New York Times would like to interview her because she is one of only a very few women attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Nyamayaro realizes that she has so many people to thank for the fact that she is an advocate for gender equity on the world stage. The result is I Am a Girl from Africa.