Bank celebrates progress in gender equity

To promote equity and raise advocacy for women’s inclusion and visibility, Kuda, the money app for Africans, has announced a month-long series of activities to commemorate this year’s International Women’s Day.

International Women’s Day is a global event celebrated annually as a focal point for giving proper attention to the rights of women and issues about their wellbeing such as gender equality, reproductive rights, and protection against violence and abuse. The global theme for this year’s IWD is, ‘Embrace Equity.’
Built around the theme, the goal of Kuda’s IWD activities is to seek more opportunities for women to make progress in their personal and professional lives, as well as to reposition women for economic growth and success in career and business.

The IWD activities planned to stretch the entire month include a showcase of the impact that Kuda has made in promoting gender equity from 2022 to 2023. The showcase will also include the company’s further commitment to gender equity.

Speaking on this year’s IWD, Rosie Hewat, the Chief People Officer at Kuda, said, “As an equal opportunity-promoting organisation, we are passionate about promoting a healthy work environment where everyone irrespective of gender can aspire, reach the top of their career and realise their personal goals. We have always been intentional about building an organisation where gender equity is an obvious norm and we are excited to report that we have made progress with reflecting this core essence particularly within our Engineering and Product teams.

This is a part of our growth process and we will continue to work towards building the type of workplace we dream of.”

She revealed that over the past year, steps taken by Kuda to promote gender equity include fine-tuning its school-to-workplace internship programme aimed to imbue young engineers and product managers with the requisite skills for career progress.

Hewat disclosed further that the company in 2022 bolstered career growth for 20 young women it sponsored to the Africa Girls In Tech BootCamp.

“As a result of these equity-promoting initiatives, Kuda remains a workplace of reference. Over the past year, we have increased the number of female hires by 133 per cent, grown the number of women on our product team by 87 per cent and increased the female membership of our engineering team by 144 per cent. We’re also proud to announce that the ratio of female-to-male employees at Kuda is now 1:1,” she stated.