When Franciska Issaka visited Stanford University in 1980 after moving to the U.S. from Ghana, she was impressed with the amenities available to the town.

She decided then that she wanted to bring such amenities from this village back to her own village, amenities such as electricity, running water, roads and telephones.

It was years later -- after she received her degree from Denver University and went on to a prestigious human rights and government career -- that she started to make that dream a reality.

In 1993, she moved back to her village, Kantia, to advocate for human rights and empower the people in her community to a better future.

Wednesday, she spoke at the University of Oklahoma about "Realizing Women's Rights in Africa: the Interface Between Cultural and Universal Rights." She said her heart was never far from her village.

"When I go back home I feel alive," she said.

Issaka, the chief executive of the Centre for Sustainable Development Initiative, said her visit to OU came at just the right time. She said she has spent so much time and energy in her home village that she had been in danger of losing her global perspective. She thanked the Women's and Gender Studies and African and African American Studies programs at OU for bringing her to campus this week, saying it gave her a better perspective and allowed her to formalize her practices into words in order to communicate her work.

She wore a brightly colored batik dress Wednesday and displayed a bright personality as well. She started off her address to a room full of students by teaching them a song in her native language, Frafra. Loosely translated, it meant "lift OU up high" and included a fist pump at just the right moment.

Issaka's joyful attitude is important in her line of work. She told difficult stories of the oppression of women in Africa, and Ghana specifically. She balanced them, however, with stories of victories that she had personally seen in protecting women and empowering them with rights they would not otherwise have had.

The effect she's had in her village is evident in a story she told. She said she and her sister attended a funeral recently where one man, who did not know them personally, was publicly criticizing their work. He said it was a shame that now no man could beat his wife in the village. If he did, she would run to the Issaka sisters and they would get him arrested.

When the man was told that the Issaka sisters were standing right there, he left without saying anything else.

Issaka has learned a lot in her years as an activist and human rights advocate. She shared what she learned with those in attendance Wednesday.

She said African culture has many practices that are harmful to women. Despite international organizations establishing women's rights since 1948, many women throughout Africa are still subject to these harmful practices, Issaka said.

"Even though we have all those documents, ... African women are still being discriminated against on a daily basis," she said.

Such practices include prohibitions against women owning property, expensive marriage rituals that lead to men believing they own their wives and treat them however they like, and women being cast out of society because they are suspected of being witches merely because they are prospering.