To significantly increase the participation of women in the economy, African businesses must actively develop a line of qualified female candidates for top management positions, so as to harness the benefits women can bring to bear on the economy through quality leadership.
Making this known was Mrs. Aisha Ahmad, chairperson, Executive Council, Women in Management, Business and Public Service (WIMBIZ) and Head, Consumer Banking at Diamond Bank.
Speaking at the plenary session of the recently concluded London Business School’s Africa Business Summit, she highlighted the need for businesses to make deliberate efforts to harness the potentials of qualified women within the workforce, while encouraging women to strive for successful careers without opting out at midlevel.
Ahmad said, “Organisations must deal with the urgent and real requirement of establishing a pipeline of qualified female candidates for consideration in top management and board positions. As it stands, representation levels dwindle at senior to top management, as many women opt out of the workforce at middle management levels.”
The Gender Agenda panel re-examined the state of gender parity in Africa and the role of women in driving macro-economic growth. The panelists especially highlighted strategies to ensure that Africa makes far better use of women in the workforce.
She used the occasion to disclose that over the last 15 years, WIMBIZ has been continually executing programmes to elevate the economic contributions of women in the workforce, including building leadership and entrepreneurial skills, advocacy, mentorships and international partnerships.
Said she: “WIMBIZ is at the forefront of enabling organisations to achieve their gender parity objectives and through the WIMBOARD, we are actively ensuring growth in the number of women appointed to board positions. The WIMBOARD initiative is a comprehensive four-pronged strategy that includes advocacy, WIMBOARD institute, maintaining an executive database and executive mentoring. We also conduct a due diligence survey that monitors the representation of women on corporate Boards and serves as an advocacy tool, when making a business case for women on boards.
“Knowing that businesses might desire to, but find it hard to find suitable women to fill certain top positions, WIMBIZ in addition to mentoring and training, is also building a database of board-ready women to ensure that a reliable pipeline of qualified women to serve this purpose is readily available.”
She said, “one critical barrier identified by a few organisations in this respect is access to a database of qualified women, but WIMBIZ seeks to address this through its executive database aimed at providing a comprehensive database of qualified women across various sectors that are available to assume these positions.”
While encouraging girls to be bold and assertive, she suggested that boys should be allowed to exhibit some of the more feminine traits, which have been proven to enhance leadership effectiveness, inherent in both genders to aid both sexes to express all sides of their personalities. She believed that quotas might help address gender parity on interim basis.
According to her, “for as long as we remain behind in critical gender parity statistics and until it becomes sine qua non to offer women the same opportunities as men, quotas are an excellent way of sustaining the organisational focus on gender parity, ensuring it is at the forefront of corporate priorities and objectives.”
The Summit Plenary Chair was Bronwyn Nielsen of CNBC Africa. Other panelists were Imoni Akpofure, Director at CDC, Sipho Gumbi, HR Executive ROA at Old Mutual and Mia Kimani of the Boston Consulting Group. Eloho Omame, CEO, Amari Ltd. moderated the session.
