Women in Leadership: Driving Innovation in a COVID-19 world
Leadership in the wake of a pandemic — Bring your seat to the table!
The theme this year was #ChooseToChallenge, commemorating ‘Women in leadership achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world.’ The pandemic compounded vulnerabilities and exacerbated existing gender inequalities, which echoed that women’s concerns are rarely prioritised. This situation highlighted the need to include more women at all levels, from decision-making to evaluation, thus shaping a more equitable future.
Systemic barriers, gender bias and gender stereotypes continue to obstruct women from pursuing and thriving in STEM careers, ergo, restricting trailblazers’ diversity seeking solutions to the most pressing challenges inclusive of the COVID-19 crisis. I had the opportunity to have a conversation with four powerful women at the forefront of the battle against COVID-19, disrupting the technology space and driving sustainable and scalable Innovation in Africa and in a global sphere: Africa’s Talking C.E.O. — Bilha Ndirangu, Powwater C.O.O. & Co-Founder — Ellie O’Neill, Head Of Operations, Bboxx Kenya — Joane Kayibanda and WelTel’s C.E.O. & Co-Founder — Dr Gabrielle Serafini. These women have managed to break barriers and grow successful businesses and, in turn, paved the way for other women looking to challenge the status quo.
Streamlining Business Communications with Africa’s Talking APIs
Bilha Ndirangu is the Chief Executive Officer at Africa’s Talking (AT), a Pan-African mobile technology company with its headquarters in Nairobi. Africa’s Talking enables software developers to bring their ideas to life and build sustainable businesses by easing access to infrastructure such as telco services. As C.E.O., Bilha provides strategic direction that aligns with the company’s ‘Developers first’ mission.
Q: The theme of 2021’s International Women’s Day is “Choose to Challenge.” What does that phrase mean to you when it comes to your career?
A: Our mission at Africa’s Talking is to help Software Developers build sustainable and scalable businesses across the continent. This began with us venturing into a space that had a considerable gap between the infrastructure that developers had access to and the barriers in place that made it extremely challenging for them to build solutions efficiently. These barriers including access to Telcos and payments, became an integral part of the reason AT started and remains a core driver of our business. We chose to challenge the status quo, broke out of the norm and democratised access to communications and payments infrastructure across the continent. We now have a platform that supports 60,000+ developers who can access Telco services and integrate to our SMS, USSD, Voice, Airtime and IoT APIs and scale business communications.
Q: What are some strategies you placed to adapt the business during the COVID-19 pandemic?
A: We adjusted during the pandemic by taking several cautionary measures. First, we transitioned to remote working to reduce the risk of people contracting the COVID-19 virus. As a technology company, we’re privileged because working remotely is possible, which may not be the case for companies in other sectors. We migrated to serving clients in a virtual manner, from previously conducting face to face meetings and having walk-ins, to investing a lot in our call centre services, remote technical support and accessible customer support teams. These changes have been more scalable and efficient than the conventional forms of interaction we grew accustomed to. We also became more deliberate about our spending, recruitment process etc. It meant that we had to delay a few things we had envisioned ourselves doing, but now that normalcy is resuming, we’re starting to unpack some of the projects and working on implementing them.
Q: What is Africa’s Talking doing to promote gender equality and creating equal opportunities?
A: The technology industry is parallel to disruption, coupled with the social and cultural divides of our time, cultivates an environment that is not always cordial to both genders. We want to encourage diversity internally at Africa’s Talking and throughout the broader workforce by encouraging and supporting women to start and run their businesses. One of our overarching goals at Africa’s Talking has been to promote equality in our team. We are doing quite well when I look at our female to male employee ratios. Women still, however, remain underrepresented on a technical front. We are working deliberately to understand what is preventing women from both a local and global perspective from pursuing engineering roles. If they do, the question then is, why don’t they stay? So it comes down to understanding those issues and implementing strategies that attract and retain more women on the engineering front.
Sparking Transformative Growth & Championing for Sustainable Clean Water
Ellie O’Neill is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Powwater, overseeing operations, finance, and impact investment management. She has spearheaded numerous successful impact investments, most notably into Viva Con Agua, Shishir Water, and Impact Water, cultivating sustainable clean water for over 80,000 people in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh, and creating dozens of jobs predominately for women. Ellie previously spent three years working for JPMorgan’s Investment Management Division in New York City and San Francisco before recognising that social entrepreneurship was her calling.
According to the U.N., 2.2 billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water services, and 4.2 billion people lack safely managed sanitation services. Risky/unsafe hygiene practices are widespread and have detrimental effects on people’s health, and have deep-rooted broader socio-economic impacts, particularly for women and girls. Access to safe water and sanitation are human rights, as recognised in 2010 by the United Nations General Assembly; this is why we need to install appropriate systems promoted by organisations to administer solutions and change behaviour in resilient and proper ways. And that’s where we now introduce, Powwater. Powwater (backed by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) provides a mobile marketplace that connects vulnerable communities with decentralised, high-quality water vendors across urban areas through a delivery network. Consumers use the app to find existing vendors, compare pricing and quality, order water, and track it to their doorstep. Leveraging location and network optimisation, the technology facilitates a faster and more reliable and high-quality last-mile delivery service than ever before. Powwater is a business with a social mission at its core, looking to bridge the gap and offer equal access and opportunity to disadvantaged populations.
Q: The theme of 2021’s International Women’s Day is “Choose to Challenge.” How does that resonate with you as a woman working at a technology scale-up?
A: I believe that technology can be leveraged to address many of the world’s most pressing problems. At Powwater, we’re focused on water: the global water crisis is one of the most challenging problems our world faces. What inspires me is the understanding that Powwater has the propensity to make a positive change for the world. Even if it’s just a small change, the satisfaction that comes from taking something and making it better is highly motivating. As a result, I wake up every morning feeling deeply inspired about the future, determined to keep challenging the norm, and convinced that good things will happen as a result.
Q: How do you think Powwater’s mission ties into the theme celebrated this International Women’s Day/Month?
A: Powwater’s mission is to empower communities globally with access to safe drinking water. Sixty-seven per cent (67%) of residents across Africa do not have piped water in their homes. Unfortunately, the burden of gathering water falls on females and children who are forced to carry water at great distances or have to wait around for hours for the water to arrive, limiting their ability to work or access education. At Powwater, we recognise that water is often a significant setback for females, and we believe that access to water should be equitable. Our solution — a mobile marketplace for water — addresses this problem head-on. Creating a reliable way for Kenyan’s to order high quality, affordable water delivered to their doorstep. We unleash everyone’s potential!
Alleviating Energy Poverty & Accelerating Energy Access
Joane Kayibanda runs Bboxx Kenya operations to help in transforming lives through access to renewable energy. Her mission is to contribute to society while growing her expertise. A Rwandan national born and raised across multiple countries in the East African region, Joane is a mother who is passionate about learning from real-life experiences.
Q: The theme of 2021’s International Women’s Day is “Choose to Challenge.” How does that resonate with you as a woman working at a technology scale-up?
A: I choose to challenge by raising mass awareness, which forges greater awareness in promoting equality and reinforcing our commitment to diversity and inclusion as a central tenet to our overall personal and business success. I manage over 100 employees in my organisation with approximately 40% as women. Choosing to challenge employee awareness creation around women’s potential and the capabilities to reach greater heights is integral from my experience. I see a lack of this within most women in my organisation. Celebrating women’s month is about promoting unity, celebration, reflection and enacting advocacy and action. This is an opportune moment to raise awareness around not only gender equality but also equal participation in the workplace and society.
Q: How do you think Bboxx’s Company’s mission ties into the theme celebrated this International Women’s Day?
A: Bboxx’s mission is to tackle a significant global problem: energy poverty. Currently, 840 million people live without access to energy, of which almost 80% are in Africa. Our mission and purpose are choosing to influence women behaviour through accelerating girl child education, income generation for women with small businesses in rural areas, etc. As a next-generation utility, we manufacture, distribute and finance decentralised solar powered systems in developing countries — and we have been leveraging our innovative IoT technology to expand access to vital utilities. Bboxx has deployed over 350,000 solar home systems. We’re choosing to challenge by bringing people into the digital economy and enabling economic development in off-grid communities, impacting those living without reliable grid connection.
Q: What are some strategies you placed to adapt the business during the COVID-19 pandemic?
A: Strategies during the COVID-19 Pandemic for Bboxx included creating Bonus/ Saving schemes for customers to pay in bulk and earn extra free days to not run out of light during the more strenuous days partnering with content providers to create additional educational content on Television. Africa’s Talking platform saved us a huge cost, considering it was important during the pandemic to continue business communication with our customers to get these strategies in place. Since we couldn’t have any physical interactions with the customers and calling thousands of customers would have been an enormous expense.
A TeleHealth Platform Virtually Connecting Patients To Care During COVID-19 Pandemic
Gabrielle is engaged with humanity and lives her life with compassion to serve. Her extensive travel and health work in both Africa and Canada has given her an appreciation for diversity and a deep understanding of the health challenges faced by many. These experiences have driven her to lead WelTel’s social enterprise with a vision to ensure equitable access for all. Growing WelTel remains one of the most exciting and important journeys of her life.
Q: The theme of 2021’s International Women’s Day is “Choose to Challenge.” How does that resonate with you as a woman working at a technology scale-up?
A: As a health technology company focused on providing equitable access to care for the world’s most marginalised populations, our challenge was to support the countries of Rwanda, Kenya, and Uganda to strengthen their public health response to the challenges of dealing with a monstrous pandemic, the likes of which had not been seen for 100 years. Our Vancouver-based company with roots in Africa was up for the challenge, committed to working long hours to hear the needs of Ministries of Health as they struggled to ensure that no person was left behind. Simultaneously, our team scaled and built services for Canadian populations living with complex health challenges in the many forgotten corners of our land, to ensure that they, like their African brothers and sisters, would be guaranteed equitable access to care.
Q: How do you think the mission of WelTel ties into the theme celebrated this International Women’s Day?
A: WelTel was the first program to use health text messaging with patients to improve health outcomes and save lives. Since its inception, WelTel’s grand challenge was to build a technology solution in response to one of the greatest public health challenges the world had ever seen, the H.I.V. pandemic, and to make it functional in one of the most geographically isolated places on earth — the Northern Arid Lands of Kenya — and we did it, and kept doing it. In a reverse knowledge translation move to Canada in 2009, we continued to build on the body of evidence to clinically validate our digital health intervention to become one of the most evidence-based digital health platforms in the world.
In conjunction with Rwanda Biomedical Center (R.B.C.), supported with funding from Grand Challenges Canada, WelTel executed a world-leading response to the COVID-19 pandemic through expedient adoption and deployment of their case-contact monitoring and support solution coupled with advanced screening and testing before the first case was diagnosed. This gallant team effort with fulsome collaborative stakeholder participation ensured that Rwanda was ready to begin the valiant pandemic response that led them to be ranked #6 in the world by the Lowy Institute. The WelTel team is honoured to have had the opportunity to support the Rwandan M.O.H. to improve health outcomes and keep their communities safe through the use of intelligent, effective communication tools like WelTel that are facilitated and enabled by the important services of our partners at Africa’s Talking.
Q: What are some strategies you placed to adapt the business during the COVID-19 pandemic?
A: As a Vancouver-based company, we deployed our systems virtually and worked round the clock to ensure that our overseas partners could execute on supporting their populations effectively and efficiently. In order to facilitate timely comms during the pandemic, we set up a number of real-time messaging channels with various members of the M.O.H. and the AT team to ensure that we could respond to urgent requests in a coordinated manner. We had regular meetings on Zoom and hosted twice-weekly feedback sessions with our African partners so that our development team in Canada could iterate the solution to meet the COVID demands in real-time. Our AT partners ensured that services were never interrupted by keeping us well-informed of operational logistics, knowing that a day without messages could mean a life was lost. Together, we have demonstrated that good communication is the hallmark of human success!
As we conclude, these are just but four women in a community of many whose stories and work are incredibly motivating and encouraging to many women looking to seek leadership roles. I’m choosing to celebrate women like these who choose to take on incredible challenges for an equitable, healthier and more sustainable world. Let’s all #ChooseToChallenge and strive for an equal world.
