More than half the world’s seven billion people watched some part of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa and it is expected many more will tune in to the Brazil tournament over the next few weeks until July 13. Less than a tenth of those will watch the tournament’s women’s equivalent.
Even though records of women playing football date back to 1892, it took 61 years after the first men’s World Cup in 1930 for a parallel women’s event to start. Six editions of the women’s tournament have been held and it commands only 407.8 million viewers. Africa and the Middle East, grouped in the same bracket for the official statistics, contribute only 39.2 million of those eyeballs.
That number is influenced by factors including technology and access to information but it also serves as an indicator of the value of the women’s game to the region. It is no surprise that Nigeria and South Africa – two of the counties with functioning women’s football leagues – lead viewership statistics with 13 million and 4.2 million people watching the Women’s World Cup respectively.
<div id="attachment_6336" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6336" class="size-medium wp-image-6336" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/B13KYMN0421-300x208.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="208" />Cape Town Roses (Dark blue) v Gauteng (blue) during the 2013 Sasol League National Championship on the 25 November 2013 at Alabama Stadium ©Muzi Ntombela/BackpagePix</div>
Nigeria is, by some distance, the African country that has advanced furthest in women’s football. Matches were reported on from the 1940s and it has had a women’s league since 1978. The most recent edition of the league, the 2013/14 season, has three divisions funded by the Nigerian Football Federation in the absence of sponsorship.
Despite a lack of regular competition, especially in their region, Nigeria’s women’s team is the most successful in Africa.
The Super Falcons are the top-ranked team on the continent, sit 34th in the world and have triumphed in eight African Women’s Championships (AWC) between 1991 and 2010. They have also participated in every women’s World Cup but have failed to get out of the group stage.
A large part of their success is on account of intense practice. In early April, Nigeria organized a training camp for their final qualification match for the AWC in May, giving themselves seven weeks of training time. Included in that was a friendly match against Cameroon, the next-best team in Africa. Games such as these is what captain Evelyn Nwabuoko thinks will make the team even better.
“We need friendly matches and we ought to play bigger teams. It’s not about results but about access to your players. You get to know your players and those to rely on during international games,” says Nwabuoko.
South Africa’s national women’s team has fared better in that department. They were the only African country to participate in the Cyprus Cup, an annual invitation-only tournament for women’s teams. South Africa have been to the event four times since 2009 but only won three matches and struggled against European opposition.
However, players described it as important to their growth.
“I found things very different from club level to the international stage – the tactics, ball work at training and moving into space at specific times during matches was a key learning area for me,” says Shiwe Nogwanya, a striker who is based in Bloemfontein in South Africa’s Free State.
South Africa also has a strong domestic structure in place. Last year, petrochemicals company Sasol signed a four-year deal to sponsor the women’s league and national team. Their’s is a multi-tiered league consisting of 144 teams, 16 in each of the country’s nine provinces.
Teams play every weekend to ensure continuity of game time and the provincial winners compete in a week-long national championship
in December.
<div id="attachment_6337" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6337" class="size-medium wp-image-6337" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/B13LAMN0368-300x183.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="183" />Cape Town Roses (red) v Bloemfontein Celtics (green and white) during the 2013 Sasol League National Championship 3rd and 4th on the 01 December 2013 at Matlosana Stadium ©Muzi Ntombela/BackpagePix</div>
Although not ideal because there is no premiership, South Africa’s new women’s national coach, former Dutch player Vera Pauw, believes it provides the pathway for players to develop.
“Without the league, there is no national team because all those players play in the league. The big challenge is how to get the 144 Sasol League teams playing with the best against the best on a more regular basis,” says Pauw.
Other African teams do not even have the luxury of that problem. Ten African women’s teams, including Congo, Uganda, Angola and Benin, are not ranked because they have been inactive for more than 18 months. Two others, Liberia and Kenya, have not played more than five matches against official opposition and so are only provisionally ranked. Others like Mauritius have yet to play even a single match.
Funding is the major challenge, something Lydia Nsekera, the first woman elected to the FIFA executive committee, who hails from Burundi, agrees with.
“There is little or no funding for female football in Africa, compared to what the male teams get. In Africa, there are people who even question the rationale for funding female football,” says Nsekera.
Small attempts are being made to change that. FIFA provides all African member associations a grant of $250,000 a year and since 2008, 15% ($37,500) of that had to be set aside for women’s football. Just like the number of people keeping an eye on the women’s game, that money is significantly less than the men get but it is all the women’s game has
for now.

Not This Time  For Africa

Fervently chasing after a passion that took me quite long to identify.”
This is what Affiong Williams’ Twitter profile reads. Spend a day with the 28-year-old entrepreneur and you believe it’s not just a clever line, but the story of her life. Her first job out of college may have been in the corporate sector, but for Williams, her passion for business was one she couldn’t ignore. It had tugged at her since she was a child growing up in Nigeria.
She was only six when with the help of her cousin she cooked and sold food to her neighborhood. By second year in college, she had already dabbled in a few odd businesses, such as buying and selling handbags on campus. She left Nigeria when she was 11, spending most of her formative years in South Africa. College was a defining time. It was here she realized what she didn’t want to do.
With a bachelor’s degree in physiology and psychology, she wanted to switch to medicine but realized her strength was business. The post graduate degree she pursued in business administration at the Witwatersrand Business School in Johannesburg was invaluable.
Williams acquired a job with an entrepreneurship incubator, which exposed her to the world of start-ups and businesses. Here, she could apply all the theory she had learned, spending four years, starting as an intern, ending as a portfolio manager. She looked at services that would help entrepreneurs grow across different sectors. It awakened her innate flair.
“I was most inspired by the entrepreneurs. In any economy, small to medium enterprises create the most jobs. I told myself this is what I want to do.”
Williams started researching business ideas and the sectors that inspired her. The South African economy was highly-developed and she knew her competitive advantage, being a foreigner, was also limited, so she veered towards Nigeria.
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“Agriculture was becoming very topical. I started reading up and asking questions,” she says.
Why is there so much inefficiency? Why is there so much waste? Why are fruits rotten? Why can’t we create finished goods? Why do Nigerian products look unappealing? What is stopping Nigerian products from being sold anywhere in the world? A few more pertinent questions and it was the light bulb moment she had been waiting for.
“I decided this is the sector I wanted to get into. I also knew agriculture is a big job creator. I wanted to make Nigerian finished products look good, I wanted to use up our raw materials, and employ a lot of people. I became obsessed. I read about fruit juices, cassava, cash crops etc, and moved into fruit.”
Capital was the next issue.
“I looked at the capital required for food processing. I started figuring out cost in terms of investment. I then stumbled upon [the idea of selling] dried fruits and realized very few people were doing this. It was not that expensive and there were not that many healthy options out there.”
In February 2012, determined to win a government entrepreneurship grant, Williams made the decision to move to Lagos.
“I knew I would win this N10 million (just over $60,000) grant that was going to be my source of capital. I traveled to Nigeria for a second round of applications and made a decision to move back, because I was so sure I would win this grant,” she says.
But did she?
“I did not. My name was not called.”
It was a setback, but Williams had it mapped out. With her savings of $15,000, she started on what was a sink-or-swim journey into a tough market that required more analysis. She drew from her experiences.
She started understanding the value chain better, and engaged in some market-research to see what consumers thought of her dried fruit product. With a tighter rein on funds, it was time to focus on the market.
“Lagos is a hugely urbanized city with a growing middle class and this is where we focused the business. We found a fair percentage of exposed and well-traveled Lagosians already familiar with the product,” she says of the growing number of health-conscious Nigerians, who had little or no time on their hands. Food choices available on the go were a major determinant of health trends.
“Because we are a food product, we are lucky. People can use an immediate taste test to prove whether they like it or not. For our core market, it’s an affordable product,” says Williams. The epiphany may have taken a while, but it was the formula she required.
Agriculture is the most important sector in the Nigerian economy and contributes up to 35% of the country’s GDP. Its 170 million population represents a large domestic market that can support and sustain local production and processing. Unfortunately, limited collaboration exists across regional value chains.
As agribusiness plays a role in jump-starting economic transformation through development of agro-based industries, successful agribusiness investments stimulate growth by providing new markets and developing an input system. This hadn’t escaped Williams’ notice.
She introduced ReelFruit, a healthy range of snacks with variants of mango and pineapple, into the Nigerian market. These are preservative-free fresh tropical fruits, dried and ready for snacking. Its target market is mainly working women, and more products are being developed: a fruit and nut mix, a cashew brand, health drink and kids’ candy. Over the past year, ReelFruit has sold in 62 locations in Nigeria.
“From a business perspective, it made sense, because we are then not exporting raw materials but actually finishing the products here. And if markets can be found for them locally or overseas, then, that’s a win. I found a partner in Ghana to produce on my behalf. They provide the finished product. Now, we get bulk products and are responsible for the packaging. In March 2013, we started selling finished products,” she says.
William’s business has also garnered recognition. She won the BiD Network Women in Business Challenge award in the Netherlands in 2013, and also the top prize for Creative Focus Africa. What inspires her?
“The can-do attitude of Nigerians. There are so many norms and misconceptions about the African woman. As an entrepreneur, despite all these, if you are passionate enough, you will always find a way around it. Having a vision and purpose is what pushed me the most to start a business,” she says.

Little Bites Of Lagos

Roberta Naicker is watching CNBC Africa in her sunny corner office in Johannesburg’s upscale Sandton suburb, and she is not looking happy. A series of bomb blasts have ripped Abuja, Nigeria, only days before the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Africa summit, and she has a team of cameramen, TV journalists and managers leaving to cover the continent’s most important business meet.
As Managing Director of the ABN Group in South Africa that operates CNBC Africa, she has the onerous task of deciding the course of action: news first, or people first?
The coffee on her table is cold. Her fingers are perhaps clammy, as she clasps them, pursing her lips, making her decision. Her people come first.
For the group’s 40-year-old managing director, family has always been a pertinent part of her life, and this, her 300-employee company, is family too.
Hailing from Durban, in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province where the weather is warm and the Indian population numerous, Naicker spent most of her girlhood aspiring to become a chartered accountant. Where others dreamt of Barbie dolls, she dreamt of a college education.
Money was always in short supply, but her parents encouraged her to study. It was 1991, three years before a free South Africa, when Naicker completed her matriculation. She recalls boycotting classes and participating in the ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ campaign in school. Somewhere in the mind of the young girl, the stirrings of change. Would she have known that 17 years on, she would be at the forefront of a large media organization covering the country Mandela envisaged?
After school in 1992, Naicker enrolled for a BCom degree at the University of Durban Westville (now UKZN).
“My parents said, ‘you worry about getting into university, we will worry about paying for it’,” says Naicker. But that was not to be. Naicker discontinued college, opting to pursue her second year BCom part-time through the University of South Africa (UNISA). In 1993, she signed up for a full-time job in her hometown at the age of 19.
“I always had a passion for numbers and my first job was as a junior accountant in a small manufacturing firm. I knew that if I am not going to get somewhere through a formal education, I am going to have to do it through hard work. Those were the goals I set for myself and that is the way I have lived my life the past 20 years,” says Naicker.
Marriage in 1998 saw her relocate to Johannesburg with her husband; this is where her career blossomed, starting in the commercial property management industry. Next up was an assignment as the finance manager of a large organization for six years until 2006.
This was before joining the ABN Group in March 2008. The group had just launched CNBC Africa, and she was hired as Head of Finance. Naicker admits it was an industry she had little knowledge of at the time.
“I was comfortable from the finance perspective, but I didn’t understand media at all. It was completely nerve-racking walking in here and thinking, ‘what am I honestly going to do’? But I saw it as a challenge.”
Naicker calls it the start of an association with an organization that believed in her, and placed all faith in her to do the job, and do it well. For this, Naicker gives all the credit to ABN Group’s Co-founder and Vice Chairman Rakesh Wahi.
As Managing Director, Roberta Naicker is responsible for the overall operations of the ABN Group, which includes CNBC Africa and FORBES AFRICA. She plays an instrumental role in the strategic planning, financing and implementation of FORBES AFRICA, ABN Productions and ABN Training Institute. She currently also serves as a board member; Chair and Managing Director of ABN Productions, ABN Pictures and the ABN Training Institute, Chair of the ABN Education Trust, and Chair of ABN Nigeria and Kenya.
A firm believer in the empowerment of women, here, Naicker speaks about how she made every opportunity – and adversity – a part of her learning curve.

Nothing But Belief

There is a difference between travellers  and tourists; a difference between a trip and journey.
If you fall into the latter category in both instances, then perhaps a jaunt to Jambiani in Zanzibar is worth considering. In three-and-a-half hours, direct bi-weekly flights (if traveling out of Johannesburg in South Africa to Zanzibar) transport the intrepid and the intrigued to another world distinctly different from the metropolis you have left behind. From the shopping malls and high rises of the city of gold heading northeast to six degrees south of the equator and, to some extent, back in time, you arrive in the spice islands of Zanzibar.
For most, the first impressions are that of the old-world Stone Town, a UNESCO World heritage site in Zanzibar city, where one loses oneself in excitingly-confusing narrow streets filled with vendors bent on selling you everything from cashew nuts and badly-recorded CDs of local music to local art and craft (the best of these being the wood works). You will find no malls here, no fast food franchises and very little to remind that you are actually in the 21st century. You become aware that almost every structure is made of coral stone featuring elaborate wooden doors, for which Zanzibar is particularly famous, guarding mysterious and rich cultural heritage within the walls.
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It is now time to head east, crossing the island, toward Jambiani where the melting pot of Arabic, British, Persian, Portuguese and other previous colonial influences give way to real rural Africa. Within an hour ($50 by road in a sedan), you arrive in Jambiani, the village that snakes its way for 10 kilometers up the southeast coast of the island. Leaving the only tar road and arriving in the village via bumpy dirt roads laden with goats and chickens, you are struck by two things. First, the mesmerizing colors of the ocean lightly covering the immense sandbar and, second, the village itself, which is beyond modest and a stark reminder of the fact you are now in one of the poorest parts of the planet.
This can be disconcerting at first, until you notice the smiles, the almost euphoric shouts of jambo (hello) from the children and the genuinely-welcoming demeanor of the people. Jambiani is different from other parts of Zanzibar in that virtually all the hotels are owned by locals, and where there are foreign-run properties, these are almost always in association with the natives either as landlords or equal partners. It is the latter that’s most appealing for travelers looking to support the local community but wanting a level of service and facilities that may be not be present in purely local accommodations.
The three-star Coral Rock Hotel here is roughly $100 per night, and offers the facilities (like Wi-Fi) and services one expects. It’s sandwiched between the ever-changing tides and colors of the Indian Ocean on the one side and the quaint working village of Jambiani on the other.
Whilst the villagers work the beach, ocean and sandbar, you will most likely be spending your time sunbathing, exploring, snorkeling, diving, kitesurfing, kayaking or eating fresh seafood and fruits. The food is enjoyable and the atmosphere relaxing whilst the climate seems to constantly stay sunny and between 28-32 degrees Celsius.
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No need for high heels and formal attire, they are wasted here. Just remember to cover up the bikinis whilst walking in the village or when walking past a mosque. The prime activity and raison d’etre is relaxation. A week here seems like the antidote to the fast-paced rat race in the city. It’s a place where you feel safe and can get away from it all.

Far From The Madding Rats

Europe and America have surely made inroads when it comes to environment-friendly electric vehicles (EV), manufacturing and finding enough customers for them, but Africa is still lagging behind in this respect.
Electric cars, which help curb greenhouse gas emissions, have been introduced in Africa, but car manufacturers admit they are yet to see a major shift from petrol- and diesel-driven cars to green cars. Clynton Yon, Product Manager of car major Toyota in South Africa, says it’s simply due to a lack of interest from the market.
“Hybrid technology is not cheap but in Europe and the US, the financial rebates buyers receive from the government [on initial purchase and also when it comes to taxes for insurance and emissions, for example congestion tax] make it a far more viable proposition. There also appears to be reluctance on the part of South Africans to adopt a greener lifestyle if it’s going to involve a higher initial financial outlay,” says Yon.
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Electric cars are still fairly expensive, and with reference to local sales, admittedly, hybrids have not achieved the kind of retail numbers they have elsewhere. The most obvious reason for this is the financial rebates offered by first-world countries are not available in South Africa, according to Yon.
“That said, Toyota has made a concerted effort to make hybrid variants more accessible. The Yaris HSD for example is the most affordable hybrid on the market,” says Yon. The Yaris HSD costs R230,000 ($21,700).
Electric engines give electric cars instant torque, creating strong and smooth acceleration. These cars first appeared in the 1880s, and were popular in the 19th and 20th centuries, until advances in combustion technology and production of cheaper petrol vehicles led to a decline in the use of electric cars.
Since 2008, a renaissance in electric vehicle manufacturing has occurred due to advances in battery and power management technology, concerns about increasing oil prices and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
If as a continent, Africa were to catch up with markets such as Europe, a lot needs to be done to educate the consumer about the effects of global warming.
About 144,000 units of another green car entrant, the Nissan LEAF, have been sold around the world, a large percentage of those sales owing to Europe since its launch in December 2010. At the moment, the LEAF commands 33% of the EV passenger car market in Europe, it sold more than 5,600 more units in 2013 versus 2012, cementing its position as a best-selling 100% electric vehicle.
The success of the Nissan LEAF in Europe has been especially propelled by strong sales in Norway where it became the best-selling car at the end of January with 650 units.
Since its launch in South Africa in November last year, the LEAF has taken off well, according to Dudu Mwelase, General Manager of Corporate Communications at Nissan South Africa. About 20 Nissan LEAF cars were sold in the first three months, but Nissan expects to sell a 100 in the first year.
Mwelase says her company’s aim is to bring about as much EV ownership as possible.
“As mobility in Africa starts to increase, there will obviously be a move to introduce environmentally-friendly vehicles. We do not foresee a mass Nissan LEAF introduction on the continent at this stage.”
Customers see electric cars as an appendage of the ongoing endorsement of all things green. For example, Heleen Ball, one of South Africa’s first LEAF customers, says that even though she was not supportive of the idea when her husband first suggested it, the car now works very well with their green lifestyle. She uses the car two or three times a week.
Plans to bring the BMW electric models to South Africa are also in full swing. The first model, the BMW i3 is earmarked for March 2015. The i3 could have been here earlier but because demand was exceeding expectations in a number of key European markets, South Africa has had to wait.
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“To ensure an acceptable waiting period for all customers who have ordered the i3, we have decided to delay market launch in South Africa and a number of countries where the i3 is not yet on sale,” says Edward Makwana, Automotive Communications Manager of BMW, South Africa.
At this stage, these cars will only be available in South Africa.
“We currently have around 11,000 pre-orders worldwide and more than 100,000 test drive requests. Customer-demand and interest in test drives exceed current production capacity. Dealers worldwide report they could sell more BMW i3s if they had them. We are also seeing a growing interest from local customers,” says Makwana. It’s clearly a green signal for electric cars.

Eco-warriors  On The Road

Depression and anxiety are highly stigmatized in the boardroom and top executives have become masters at keeping it locked down, going to extreme lengths to hide such problems.
In the fast-paced corporate world, if you are falling apart, you dare not show it. But is that a good thing?
Recent research has shown many successful women are victims of stress as they strive to balance work and family. But even as children and careers collide, women need to prioritize their wellbeing.
Take 40-year-old successful corporate woman and mother of two, Nicci (surname withheld for confidentiality), who says she experienced “a ridiculously heightened sense of anxiety” possibly linked to post-natal depression after the birth of her first child.
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“I was 36, I was trying to run a business, a home and look after my baby. I remember feeling isolated, alone and incompetent, and being an established business woman, that was a terrible feeling,” she says, echoing the thoughts of many like her.
“I have learned there is no such thing as the perfect balance between a career and motherhood. This is a myth propagated by the media and there is no way women are achieving this holy grail. There are times when you have more time for your career, then something happens and bang, you have to pay more attention to your family. It’s also important to note that a man who has a successful wife often simply assumes he will also have the perfect wife and mother and it is our complicity in this which adds to the pressure. We, as women, try and do it all,” says Nicci.
Dr Colinda Linde, Chair of the Advisory Board at the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG), and a practicing clinical psychologist, feels modern working women have no role models when it comes to managing the demands of a career and family life.
“Even if our mothers worked, few had careers which resembled those of today and the demands of parenting have also changed, with children’s schedules often as busy as those of their parents. In a dual income household, it mainly still falls to the woman to run the home. This leads to feeling divided and not really being present in the moment – when you are at a school event, your phone is still beeping and when you are at work, your home or issues with your children may also be on your mind,” says Linde.
Over time, this leads to stress and burnout. She says while women learn to rely on other women such as housekeepers or mothers to help with child-rearing, they tend not to expect their partners to take on domestic responsibilities.
“There is a trend emerging where men are doing more to help in the home than their fathers did, by a significant amount, but it is still a relatively small part compared to the typical female portfolio of duties,” says Linde.
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Falling Off The Cliff
Richard Hawkey from Equilibrium Solutions, who has worked with Linde and has conducted substantial research, reveals findings where anxiety, depression or burnout, while highly stigmatized as a sign of weakness, are more than common, with women more affected than men.
Hawkey, who calls himself ‘the recovering banker’, says he slipped into severe clinical depression in 2010 after 15 years in a top position in the finance sector.
“As a senior manager, I had no idea how damaging stress was, or that if you are a Type-A personality (achiever, driver, controller), there isn’t necessarily a slow decline to warn you the cliff is approaching – you simply fall off the end one day. I was happily married, with great children and a house in the suburbs, along with all the trappings of success, so how could I have a breakdown and become depressed?”
Since then, he has recovered and is finishing a Master’s degree in Applied Psychology, and also set up his company Equilibrium Solutions, which in partnership with several doctors, has designed Vitals Software, a confidential online stress self-awareness and management tool.
He gathered and analyzed data from 2,500 respondents surveyed via this online resource. Most were white-collar workers, 98% from South Africa.
Hawkey says key findings, such as 37% complaining of unexplained chest pains were “worryingly high”, as was the 50% of respondents ‘living for Fridays’, highlighting high levels of apathy
and demotivation.
He adds women consistently scored higher than men in the manifestation of various symptoms.
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Hawkey says the situation may well be worse than indicated by the findings, as anecdotal evidence reveals executives are self-medicating, won’t use Employee Assistance Programs and will take two weeks of leave pretending they are ‘going on holiday’, but in fact are booking into a psychiatric unit.
“This anecdotal evidence is quite terrifying. Executives will pay for such treatment with cash and will not use their medical aid in order to keep the problem hidden,” he says.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 350 million people across the globe suffer from depression, with less than half receiving treatment due to a number of barriers, a prime one being the social stigma attached to mental disorders.
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More Pressure For The Top Brass
While women trying to balance a career and family are expected not to show any weakness, Hawkey adds that women in the upper echelons of management are particularly under pressure, as they have to appear tough and if from a historically-disadvantaged background, have to prove themselves beyond tokenism, while at the same time shoulder the burden of family.
“My advice to women who are feeling overwhelmed is to speak to someone you trust. It’s important to know you are not alone,” he says.

Don’t Worry,  The CEO Gets Depressed Too

It’s hard to believe Danai Gurira wields a sword for a living.
On the small screen, she’s Michonne, a swift zombie slayer in America’s current hit-television series The Walking Dead.
Off-screen however, seeing her perched comfortably in a corner of her hotel room, stirring honey into her tea on a wet Johannesburg morning, is a slightly odd experience.
This is because there’s no trace of that steely aggressiveness her character has in The Walking Dead. Her current choice of outfit, a gleaming fitted white dress and perfectly crimson lipstick, is also a far cry from Michonne’s dirty khakis and dreadlocks.
With a strong track record of stellar roles both on celluloid and television in America, Gurira is channeling her influence into investing in the arts in Zimbabwe. This is in the hope that her home country and the rest of the continent will start to do the same, with the African woman as the main beneficiary.
“The idea of telling African women stories was [me] responding to a call I felt needed to be done, that I had to do in the course of my life,” says Gurira.
“I had to do it in a way that was excellent and facilitated other people’s talents, gave stories to women who often don’t get to tell stories, and don’t get to be the lead in a story.”
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Despite being born in Iowa in the United States, Gurira calls Zimbabwe home, where she spent much of her younger life with her family until the age of 19. She then returned to America and enrolled at the Macalester College in Minnesota. Since graduating and now, at 36, Gurira has received critical acclaim for her acting, but what stands out is her playwriting. Her play In the Continuum alone garnered the Helen Hayes, Obie and Outer Critics Circle awards. Her 2012 play, The Convert, also scored her a nomination from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Writing.
“I always wanted to tell really powerful stories as an actor, but I will say there was something very powerful and interesting to me about being the creator of a story. When I get acting work, I go in, do it and it’s something I have been trained in. When I get a job I embrace it, but the thing that burdens me is getting the stories out,” she says.
It’s no surprise then that all of Gurira’s plays have the woman as the central character. This is from two women dealing with HIV in In the Continuum to abduction and sexual exploitation of women during wartime in Eclipsed.  These are harrowing and poignant women’s stories, intermingled with uncomfortable truths rarely talked about. Gurira nonetheless exposes them on stage.
“I have to get uncomfortable when I tell a story, and then I have to allow other people to get uncomfortable too. As a child growing up on the [African] continent, I will say I was raised in a home where I was allowed to be rather outspoken. I’m thankful I grew up in that environment,” says Gurira.
“I think that that sort of discomfort of letting girls be front and center in the stories I tell is a discomfort I want people to have. There are some discomforts I pursue, because I want that story to be told. That allows for people to start to really grapple with things, and then perchance progress towards healing. So I definitely pursue discomfort in the stories I tell.”
Investment in the arts is therefore crucial for the continent, where women dominate the informal sector.  According to a United Nations report, 84% of women nonagricultural workers were informally employed between 1999 and 2000 in sub-Saharan Africa, as opposed to 63% of nonagricultural male workers.
While women are at a clear disadvantage, the silver lining, according to the report, was that the lack of permanent employment pushed women towards self-employment.
Almasi, Gurira’s dramatic arts training organization in Zimbabwe, could be another platform that encourages self-investment.
It is however a fairly young organization, and will need more than just Gurira’s founding name to build its theater foundations.
“I felt there was stagnancy in [Zimbabwe’s] progress in this particular art form. Not music, not literature, just the dramatic arts.”
Arts funding in Zimbabwe, according to Gurira, has only been trickling in despite the country’s prolific literary works, from the likes of Shimmer Chinodya, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Cont Mhlanga.
With a new play on the cards, and her existing plays in the process of being dramatized in Malawi and Zambia, Gurira expects an interesting diasporic language to begin unfolding in the name of theater.
“I want Zimbabwe to have great literary work. Just like we have NoViolet Bulawayo and Tsitsi Dangarembga, we need more literary artists in the dramatic realm. I think the world is almost ready to hear our stories, and it’s a fertile moment for the African and the African woman to start taking the helm in terms of being a storyteller,” she says.

A Sword as mighty as the pen

Every country in Africa seems to want its share of the fashion business, and forge its own style identity. What better way to do so than with glitzy week-long fashion extravaganzas?
South Africa has always enjoyed a lead in this department. Three of the most popular annual fashion fiestas here are the fashion weeks organized by African Fashion International (AFI), recognized for their association with the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Weeks of New York, Berlin and Miami. AFI puts together three events in Johannesburg and Cape Town, linking a luxury car brand with top fashion.
In addition, the country also hosts the South African Fashion Week, yet another showing of superlative design and talent. With as many fashion-forward events through the year, it is clear they are viable business platforms, particularly for the local designers who get to showcase their collections and be noticed by media and discerning buyers.
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“Once the show is over, the buyers, the press and couture clients move on to the next show on their list. The designer goes back to his or her showroom to get ready for the onslaught of buyers,” says AFI spokesperson Nicholas Maweni.  One of the designers who has benefitted from these fashion weeks is Abigail Betz. Her three-dimensional opening sequence raised the stakes at the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Joburg held in March when South African model Lalla Hirayama appeared dressed like a geisha, complete with milk-white face, bold eyeshadow and pink lips. Her collection had elements of lace, some tartan and dogstooth for the winter jackets. Betz had sold two garments at a special preview for clients even before her collection had graced the catwalk.
“I don’t just send things down the ramp that are crazy and ridiculous that I know I can’t sell. Every single piece of fabric that I buy, every month of work, detailing, beading is very carefully thought through. It’s thought through for a very particular client base,” says Betz, who also has clients in Angola, Botswana, Namibia, and overseas. Other designers like Shana Morland of Shana, see the fashion weeks as effective marketing platforms.
“Showing at fashion week allows us to bring our customers and the media into an environment purely created by us to launch our latest range. We are also able to give our customers a great experience of the brand,” says Morland. Though Morland hasn’t shown on international ramps yet, she has overseas clients who visit her stores in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
The fashion industry is indeed a competitive, challenging market. Over the past year, South Africa has seen numerous international brands making their way into the market, raising the competition. Morland says international brands are a threat when it comes to pricing.
“Maintaining a locally-manufactured label adds a lot to the cost, whereas international labels are getting the garments at extremely small costs. Our customers are people who value firstly local design but also the experience they get when walking into our store and having a one-on-one relationship,” says Morland.
Betz says the influx of international brands is actually welcome.
“It’s good for everybody. If we’re not exposed to what other people are doing, we’re just going to become stagnant and get left behind. It’s very important for us to have the stimulation to want to push and move forward. If other big brands are coming in, that’s good,” she says.
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Fashion weeks not only benefit organizers and designers. Every show generates its share of part-time jobs for the models, the interns and production companies working directly and indirectly with the event.
“At any stage during the fashion week, there are over 200 people employed and many SMEs supported through the AFI supply chain management,” says Maweni.
Through the partnership with Mercedes-Benz, AFI sends, through an exchange program, some of the designers to other global Mercedes-Benz Fashion Weeks.
Fashion designer David Tlale was the first South African to have a solo show at this year’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week New York, Autumn/Winter, after three seasons of installations. Maweni says the global collaboration is a great benefit to the business of fashion and supports a rich territory for brands wishing to associate with luxury, style and design.

A geisha In Africa

Beauty queens are tall, slender 20-somethings with wavy hair and porcelain skin pledging for world peace. While that is the widely-held perception, older women will also get to do their turn on the ramp as the contestants of Mrs South Africa on August 8 at the Emperor’s Palace
in Johannesburg.
This year, the event will see 41-year-old South African Riana Mooi try her best to win the crown; she is the oldest finalist to participate in the pageant’s history. As its name implies, Mrs South Africa is aimed at married women between ages 25 and 50. For Mooi, age is no deterrent as she hopes to inspire others like her.
“Your life does not end when you get married and have kids. You don’t need to let your age define you or limit you from opportunities,” says Mooi, who is a mother of two and works for Nedbank
in Johannesburg.
For some like Joani Johnson, who won Mrs South Africa in 2009, the contest was a stepping stone for a full-time career as a businesswoman. Two years after she won the crown, she bought the pageant for R500,000 ($47,600) from its previous owner. Since then, Johnson has been working hard on the image of the contest, and is now readying for the 2014 event. Johnson is also trying to shake off her beauty queen persona as she wants to be seen as more than just a pretty face.
“Being in the pageant industry, a lot of people assume that you’re this beauty queen, this ‘poppy’ with no brain. Sometimes you can actually use that to your advantage; I’ve walked into a lot of meetings where people have underestimated me.”
Johnson would like to see the pageant gain as much recognition as its better-known counterpart, Miss South Africa, which dates back to 1956, when Norma Vorster became its first winner.
The 2014 edition of the pageant televized to a national audience in March was a glamorous night replete with celebrity judges and special performances by famed South African musicians Mi Casa, Bucie, Matthew Mole and Brendan Jury. This was the night 23-year-old Roulene Strauss was crowned Miss South Africa 2014.
While most competitions stipulate a minimum height and size requirement, Melinda Bam, a former Miss South Africa (2011) and currently Executive Director of the pageant, says the organizers don’t put any pressure on the girls to look a certain way. Bam credits much of the success of this year’s competition to its re-branding through wide television coverage of the run-up to the pageant as well as its publicity on social media.
The pageant has been a great platform to launch careers. Basetsana Makgalemele (now Basetsana Kumalo), arguably its most successful winner, was crowned Miss South Africa in 1994, the year South Africa became a free, democratic country. Later that year, she was also crowned first runner-up at the Miss World pageant in Sun City, South Africa.
Kumalo is today a successful businesswoman in the entertainment industry. Other Miss South Africa winners to have gained fame in the entertainment sector include Jo-Ann Strauss, Cindy Nell, Nicole Flint, Bokang Montjane and Peggy-Sue Khumalo.
Strauss, this year’s winner, put a hold on her medical studies to pursue her dream, and says the win is part of her bigger plan to start a medical business. Mixing medicine and business would be following in the footsteps of her role model Precious Motsepe, a medical doctor and Executive Chairperson of African Fashion International in South Africa.
“I’ve always looked up to her. You see these business couples where the man is the strong one and the woman is the one who supports the husband. But I’ve always seen Dr Precious as someone who is independent and strong in her own way as well,” says Strauss.
While there are many critics of the beauty pageant industry, winners attest such contests lead to empowering careers like any other – only that they have to look beyond the gloss and the glam.

Beyond Lipstick & Luster

To describe Brenda Davies, spiritual guru and faith healer, as an extraordinary person does not begin to do her justice. Even a brief retelling of her life story takes her from a tough upbringing in the North of England during the war, breaking through class barriers and becoming a consultant psychiatrist in the United Kingdom, to life today on a Zambian farm where she lives and supports 112 grown-up orphans.
From a very young age, Davies felt a strong connection with spirits, and she now works as a psychiatrist, faith healer and medium, teaching and writing about such things with amazing success around the world.
Aged in her mid-70s, her work incorporates the structures and rigor of traditional medicine but includes less orthodox skills which she has used to establish the Dr Brenda Davies International School of Healing and Spiritual Development.
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The first two years of school is for anybody who wants to sign up.
“It’s quite emotionally demanding, and at the end they are presented with a Diploma in Spiritual Development,” says Davies. By invitation, students then progress to healing techniques which involve reading and using energy.
“In the here and now, I marry together my medical career, my natural gift as what people call a healer, and all the other things that I love to do,” she says.
For Davies, the ‘here and now’ means running a farm 30 kilometers from Lusaka, milking cows and helping build a wall. Or seeing somebody for psychiatry or with a cut foot where she can do a bit of surgery, or writing her many books, healing or teaching at her worldwide school.
“We don’t run a traditional farm. We grow vegetables and sell those, but rather we tend to farm people. Everyone gets some training and we have nurses, teachers, electricians, even a conservationist.”
Her spiritual and healing work takes her everywhere. In Japan, she has a large following and works at the government level advizing how spirituality can help in the workplace and curb the high suicide rate there. In Zambia, people might come for psychotherapy or marital counseling. She mentors entrepreneurs and politicians. She works with corporates in business and banking worldwide. And she is doing ongoing conflict work in Cyprus and Bosnia, working at grass-roots level helping bring people on both sides of the conflict together.
So to what extent does Davies run her practice as a business?
She has a set rate for work in different countries, but why she works is not about money, it’s about people.
“That said, if someone wants to send me a large sum of money I’m delighted. I don’t need it in my bank, I need it to come through me and I’ll put it where it needs to be.”
For Davies, each monetary transaction is ‘an exchange of energy’. She is happy to take payment in kind if people can’t afford to pay. Money must never stop people getting to see her as she believes there is always a pre-ordained reason why people meet. She loves working with people who are trying to make their way, and one of her ‘joys in life’ is a company called BongoHive, Lusaka’s Technology and Innovation Hub.
BongoHive may be a successful Innovation Hub today, but only recently they were a collection of nine or 10 young people who wanted to make apps – but who had nothing.
In true Davies style, she gave them $15,000, and told them to buy what they needed and to get on with it. She provided structure and leadership, and a couple more ‘exchanges of energy’ along the way. But most importantly, she taught them about spiritual prosperity.
“The very first day I met them, I said here’s the philosophy of spiritual prosperity. You give either before you get or you give immediately after you get, you are always letting it go, so that more can come in – and we always rejoice in everybody else’s success.”
For Davies, those are the principles from which everything grows.
So have BongoHive forgotten their founding principles now that they have won a $50,000 grant from the World Bank and are a big success?
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“When they were going to get some training for 12 people, they asked could they give away some of it by sharing? They have been fantastic!” says Davies.
She is on one of her regular teaching tours which take her around the world. This one is four weeks long, and she is heading to Berlin for seven days for the next leg.
For a woman to become a doctor in post-war Britain, particularly from a poor, working-class background, was exceptional.
“I always had this healer stuff within me, and I used to do it with animals when I was little. No one in my family had ever been to university, let alone done medicine,” she says.
She went on to specialize in psychiatry and work as a consultant in both the National Health Service and in private hospitals. Gradually she began to introduce spirituality and healing into her work in the late 1990s.
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Her other burning life ambition was to go to Africa, having seen pictures of Africa in a book when growing up. So at the age of 27, she set off for Africa.
“Immediately I arrived, I felt that Africa is my spiritual home and where I’m meant to be. And even though I left Africa for a long period in the middle of my life, that has never changed.”
Davies now lives on 100 acres of wonderful land built around two hills and the Kafue River. She describes it as ‘stunning, stunningly beautiful’.
“My dream was to make it into a place of peace and healing, where people with nowhere to go, particularly kids, could come.”
She says that she ‘asked’ for people to come and help her with the project, and that several young orphans were sent to her.
“I arrived there on my own, realized the house had a leaky roof and that I was going to need help. A young man walked up, asked if I needed help. He was a 17-year-old orphan and he’s still with me. He’s now the farm manager”.
Just before we finish, Davies explains what it feels like to communicate with souls.
“Sometimes people want mediumship. A soul has a higher vibrational frequency, and so what I will do is I will raise my frequency levels, the soul will lower theirs until we perceive each other. I’ll sometimes hear them, sometimes feel them, and I’ll speak through my own voice.”
I am not sure I would or could have believed anyone who sat on a sofa and told me about communicating with lost souls. But with Davies, it all seems perfectly normal and eminently believable.

A Healer  Of Souls

She has been listed as one of the ‘12 Names to Change the World’ by the Spanish National Centre for Research on Human Evolution as well as one of the top 10 most influential women in science and technology on the African continent by technology news website IT News Africa.
That’s 62-year-old professor Tebello Nyokong from Rhodes University in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, who is breaking the boundaries of science in cancer research.
Meeting her in her office at the university, one is immediately drawn to her warm personality and the twinkle in her eye. By her own admission, she likes to laugh a lot, and loudly.
Yet, the work she does is no laughing matter.
As Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and Nanotechnology at the university, as well as Director of the DST Mintek Nanotechnology Innovation Centre, Nyokong has attracted millions of rands in funding towards her research based on photodynamic therapy (PDT) of cancer.
PDT, which uses dyes and light, is already available for some cancers in the United States (US), Europe and Russia, but currently has strong side effects as the drugs hone in on healthy as well as cancerous tissues.
“Our whole aim is to make molecules that are cancer-specific so that healthy tissue will not be affected,” says Nyokong, going on to detailing the specifics, which any lay person would find hard to understand.
“In our research, PDT is combined with nanoparticles that absorb and re-emit light, thus enabling for visualization in addition to cancer treatment. In cancer therapy, nanoparticles act as delivery agents of the drugs selectively to the cancer tissue. This is due to the fact that cancer has leaky vasculature which allows nanoparticles to enter.”
Simply put, this means the drugs will specifically target cancer cells, which will see cumbersome treatments such as chemotherapy move into the dark ages.
Having overseen several formal collaborations with counterparts across the globe, Nyokong has also been awarded a prestigious Adjunct Professorship by the University of Tromsø in Norway and numerous international scientists have visited her laboratory. She has also hosted many postdoctoral candidates from around the world.
But she is quick to point out that her research is still in the pre-clinical trial phase and many years away from reaching the market.
Considered an icon in the world of science, Nyokong’s state-of-the-art laboratory is a far cry from her primary school days in Lesotho where as a child, she spent alternate days tending sheep and on the weekends, assisted her father who was a construction laborer. These tasks led her to conclude she could do anything a boy could do.
“At the start my father influenced my path. He believed that the apartheid system could only be defeated through education and I was encouraged to excel at a very young age,” she says.
And excel she did, having chosen art subjects for her matric, she changed to science two years before sitting her matric exams.
“The teachers accepted me after this mad move from arts to science and when I entered the University of Lesotho, I was greatly influenced by my lecturer, Dr Gray. After that I was driven by my desire to beat the odds,” she says.
Nyokong went on to obtain her PhD from the University of Western Ontario in 1987 and a Fulbright Fellowship for postdoctoral study at the University of Notre Dame in the US.
“I had academic loneliness, since there were very few women when I started. Now my past students have become professors and are my academic colleagues,” she says.
And she is excited and outspoken about Africa’s potential to excel in science.
On being awarded the National Research Foundation Lifetime Achiever Award last October, she says, “I am driven by being an African, completely, I’m passionate to see us succeed.”
And she is equally passionate when it comes to her students.
“I urge all young people in the country to study to the highest possible level [PhD]. The development of South Africa will depend on highly skilled labor. No country can have lasting economic growth or development without a solid science base. Science is thought to be hard, no, it’s not difficult,” she says. She wishes schools were not judged on their pass rate, but rather on their pupils’ abilities in maths and science.
Her work ethic is phenomenal and her research output has been described as simply extraordinary. In 2012, she published 51 articles, all of them internationally peer-reviewed; in 2013, she released 52 publications and 17 so far this year.
Nyokong admits she has a hectic schedule, between supervising students and attending scientific conferences around the world, which includes going to Oman this year for the World Academy of Sciences conference, where she will be the global representative in chemistry.
And when she’s not in the lab or traveling, Nyokong loves walking, as well as gardening, which she describes as “physical activity with a purpose”. She confesses a great weakness when it comes to beautiful bags and shoes and her ‘must reads’ are Malcolm Gladwell’s  David and Goliath
and Outliers.
A grandmother of two, her favorite holiday destination is Mauritius. As we end the interview,
3I ask her what it’s like to have come from a shepherd girl to a leading woman of science.
“Sometimes I think gosh, that is not me. I’m just doing my work, that’s all it is. I love my students and I embarrass them a lot sometimes.”
When she laughs, it’s from the core of her being. And with the list of honors and accomplishments she has garnered, no wonder she smiles – and the world of science with her.

From Shepherd  To scientist

When you meet her, you are immediately struck by the assertive, determined woman she is. But beneath the tough exterior is a woman with a story, a story of adversity and abuse that has led to her becoming one of Uganda’s top travel and tour operators.
Jackie Kemirembe Rubuubi, the Founder and Managing Director of Platinum Safaris, started small. She began her career in the airline industry as a security officer with Sabena Airways, now known as Brussels Airlines. She worked there until the company, which she calls “a very professional workplace”, ran into operational troubles. It was forced to temporarily close down and change names. She had to make ends meet so she found a temporary job at the Kenya Airways office in Uganda’s capital Kampala.
Soon, a new airline, Africa One, made an entry in the Ugandan airspace. And Rubuubi was headhunted for a top managerial position. The offer came with many promises including tempting bonuses. This made her give it her best, but after some time on the job, Rubuubi started noticing the cracks.
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“Suddenly, I had multiple directors to report to instead of the one that was indicated in my appointment letter. I also never got the bonuses despite signing lucrative deals,” she says. One of the male directors particularly got meddlesome in her duties, unilaterally issuing holiday breaks to members of her team. This upset operations in the section that Rubuubi headed. Frustration set in.
“It was pure harassment and lack of professionalism,” she says.
At the height of it, she decided to have a one-on-one with the female director about the state of affairs. It was going to be a conversation she would never forget – for a long time.
“The director I sought to confide in and the one I was actually supposed to be reporting to told me that as long as I remained employed with them, it wouldn’t be strange if she asked me to go and make their beds! In her view, I was to do anything they wanted me to do despite being a manager. I immediately made up my mind to resign, bringing an end to two daunting years. It turned out to be the worst job I ever had.”
That conversation gave Rubuubi enough reason to leave – and consider starting something on her own. She retreated to London where she found a job as an accountant in a retail food chain.
Within a year, she returned to Uganda on maternity leave. She never returned to London though she kept being paid her salary. She used the money to open a garment shop. The new venture wasn’t doing well but she wanted to avoid being employed again.
It was not easy.
At one point, when she traveled to Dubai to source garments for her shop, she met a Turkish couple who convinced her to open an employment agency to recruit people in Kampala and connect them to odd jobs in Dubai.
The couple turned out to be imposters when they vanished with the $27,000 Rubuubi had given them to process visas for the 230 recruits that had registered.
Her attempts to involve Interpol in tracing them were met with numerous death threats from the couple. She finally gave up and devised a new plan.
With an International Air Transport Association (IATA) qualification under her belt, Rubuubi decided to open a travel and tour company. She registered Platinum Safaris in 2002, starting operations in a small room.
Her first client was an official from the International Criminal Court who not only became a regular but also brought in other customers. The business prospered and she registered it with professional bodies. This brought more opportunities until she shifted office to a new location.
Today, Platinum Safaris is a leading tour and travel service provider in the East African region known for services such as air-ticketing, safaris across the Great Lakes region, honeymoon packages, visa advisory, conference planning and bookings for white-water rafting and gorilla-tracking.
Last year, Platinum received an accolade from Amadeus, a firm that provides travel software and technology solutions for the global travel industry, for its high adoption of solutions. The company also has a raft of honors from other industry players including airlines.
Rubuubi’s vision is to venture into luxury tourism similar to what is offered in Morocco. She is in the final stages of acquiring speedboats that will introduce a new tourism circuit connecting major islands on Lake Victoria, Africa’s greatest lake and source of the Nile.
She says that what she went through made her realize women surely deserve better at the workplace.
“No one expects women to perform better than men. But the fact is many women are stronger than men,” she says.

No More Suffering The Boss

Bottles of perfume or liquor are standard items in suitcases coming home from a trip to America. But when Juliana Rotich, Co-founder and Executive Director of Ushahidi, heads into customs in Nairobi, immigration officials balk at the circuit boards packed into her bags. Rotich laughs when recalling her explanations to officials about her unusual haul – they  help facilitate prototyping new tech solutions in Africa.
Rotich is part of the vanguard of African techies creating ‘by Africans, for Africans’ solutions that respond to the local context and problems that ambitious coders and ordinary cell phone users alike face on the continent. Rather than innovations and technology made ‘for the developing world’, what they are tending toward, says Rotich, is more collaboration.
“Not so much developing for but developing with, which will result in better products that have more impact,” she says.
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The 36-year-old Kenyan, who studied and worked in the United States (US), says she feels most at home in the MediaLab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (which she calls ‘nerdvana’) where she is a fellow, and also at the iHub (an innovation hub for the technology community) in Nairobi.
The flow of information and new connections in Africa has been tremendous in the past decade: new flight routes allow us to go from country to country without a time-consuming connection through Europe.
Yet the Internet, the defining medium of our age, remains out of regular reach for many Africans because of infrastructure issues with older technology. In addition are electricity failures and surges that wreak havoc with productivity and damage expensive equipment. Even in cities widely electrified and where offices have some sort of backup plan, efficiency is curtailed when every person has to reboot and reconnect on a regular basis.
“Despite leaps of progress, one of the showstoppers is when the electricity goes out,” says Rotich.
Lack of Internet also drives up related costs by forcing people to resort to costly telephone calls and SMSes, when using Skype or WhatsApp is virtually free with online access. Enter BRCK, a high-performance modem with a battery big enough to last a full workday, which can charge multiple devices, and can take power from a wall socket, car battery, or just about
any source.
It’s not the sort of solution that’s wanted or needed in cities where continuous electricity and public Wi-Fi are taken for granted.
BRCK is rugged enough to protect its circuits from dust, as well as from ‘dirty’ voltage that can fry computers during a power surge. Multiple SIMs can be used to search for the fastest connection, and aid travelers using various Internet providers in different countries. Financed in part by a Kickstarter campaign, and retailing at $199, the first batch of BRCKs shipped in May.
“If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere,” says Rotich.
Besides BRCK, Ushahidi is the other product Rotich is part of. Ushahidi, which means ‘testimony’ in Swahili, is the name of both the open source crowdmapping software as well as the not-for-profit tech company that provides it. Last year, Ushahidi won a prestigious MacArthur award as a Creative Organization.
Ushahidi was born out of the problematic 2008 elections in Kenya. With traditional media houses shutting down, it was a website initially developed to map reports of post-election violence in Kenya based on eyewitness reports submitted via the web and mobile phones.
More than 45,000 crowdsourced Ushahidi maps have since appeared all over the world, in more than 30 languages, on topics as diverse as human rights abuse, environmental devastation, and where to find the best burger in town.
Ushahidi is registered as a non-profit in the US (with nodes all over, including the key one in Kenya), making it a bit of an
odd duck.
“The money is not in the code – it’s in the expertise to use that open source code, to provide that personalized experience,” says Rotich.
So while Ushahidi software is open source, the organization offers consulting services to large organizations, including United Nations agencies and large nongovernmental organizations that require expertise for implementation. This work makes Ushahidi more sustainable.
“We do get grants, but the percentage of external income is starting to shift,” says Rotich.
It’s hard to get Rotich to talk specifically about her own role at Ushahidi, as she refers to all their successes from a collective point of view. That said, she is the group’s most public face and voice, speaking at TED (a global set of conferences), Design Indaba (held in March in Cape Town), the World Economic Forum, and other groups of movers and shakers. When asked if she envisioned herself in this role, she opens her eyes wide and shakes her head to say no, momentarily speechless, but says it’s an honor to share her organization’s story with people who haven’t heard of it.
“It’s an opportunity to reach more people with an idea we hope can interest them. We don’t have a media budget; we don’t have ads on TV,” she says.
Last year, both of Rotich’s grandmothers passed away, and when she speaks of the irreplaceable loss, her pain is palpable. But she draws strength in remembering their lessons that she has integrated into her life and work, lessons such as the importance of fixing things and helping others.
“The act of making is something that is intrinsic to African culture,” she says, adding that it’s important not to look at the act of making as something beneath you.

A Face In The  Kenyan Crowd

Archel Bernard sits on a bar stool in the middle of her little boutique in downtown Monrovia as a handful of customers drift in and out. Pieces of West African lapa hang over wooden ladders and colorful African-Western fusion designs sit on either side. A sign beside the counter that is made up of bamboo stakes reads ‘Life is Too Short to Wear Boring Clothes’.
The 25-year-old designer and businesswoman moved from Atlanta in the United States (US) in 2011 to her family’s hometown for a job at the government’s oil corporation, and now moonlights as a fashion designer in her spare time. Bernard established a fashion label called ‘It’s Archel’ and set up a shop called Mango Rags in downtown Monrovia, with her business partner Tania Abraham, who also grew up abroad, mainly in the United Kingdom. The shop celebrated its first anniversary in February and is among a small number of boutiques specializing in contemporary African designs, in a country where small fashion businesses are just beginning to emerge over a decade after the civil war, when shopping for clothes was a luxury many could not afford.
Mango Rags, now a polished little shop located in Bernard’s grandfather’s compound that was formerly a car garage, had less glamorous beginnings. Bernard would chug around the city in a white pickup truck driven by her mother Brenda Bush, a producer and writer for CNN, with a tape measure and notebook into which she would jot down her customers’ measurements. Building up a collection of tailors from the workshops spread throughout the city, she dropped off fabric and sketches of designs in between working her nine to five job producing multimedia for the National Oil Company of Liberia (NOCAL). Bernard began to save money to open and fit the shop; now with a steady stream of mainly expatriate customers, she is looking to expand.
Born and raised in the US, but always identifying as Liberian and African, Bernard grew up in Atlanta, one of the few black kids in her community of Marietta.
When her mother did carpooling, she dressed in funky African clothes and head wraps.
“Can you dress like the normal mums do?” she had asked her, but later grew to appreciate her style. Named Archel, after her father Archie (a cultural quirk in Liberia), few of her schoolmates could pronounce her name, and so her label is ‘It’s Archel.’
When she was 16, Bernard returned to Liberia after the war to visit her grandfather, a businessman who had stayed throughout the 14-year civil war, despite the family’s insistence that he leave.
“When we landed you could have fried an egg on the runway because there was nothing. It was just a stretch of huts and then you approach the city and there are more concrete structures, but it’s still not America,” says Bernard.
She says the government offers few incentives for young educated Liberians to return, but chooses to stay because she wants to help change Liberia, and transform from a chronic charity case to a ‘place to be’ in Africa.
Now a Liberian returnee, self-described “third world socialite”, designer and government worker, Bernard has capitalized on her social networks, family connections and sense of style to build up her business in a climate that is challenging for entrepreneurs and where a fashion scene is fledgling. Three fashion weeks have been held within the past five years, with the most recent being Monrovia Fashion Week that was held in December, and only five designers have boutiques throughout the city.
“I still kind of feel like a fraud in this; I never went to fashion school,” says Bernard.
Most of the local designers haven’t studied fashion and draw on West African lapas and traditional fabrics and the flamboyant Liberian style as inspiration.
“Liberians really like to dress, they always want to have the nicest thing on,” she says.
Bernard’s main buyers are expatriates; she wishes she had more Liberian customers, but a strong bargaining culture coupled with a lack of respect for intellectual property make things difficult.
Like many Liberians who lived in exile with their families in the US during the war, Bernard returned to her family’s homeland in search of opportunity. With only one subject left to complete of her Science Technology and Culture degree at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Bernard decided to head home to Liberia to work in the local media. She harbored dreams of being Liberia’s Oprah and wanted to create a lifestyle series that focused on the more positive side of the nation that would air on local television stations.
Liberia wasn’t quite ready for a ‘queen of talk’, so instead Bernard worked for Monrovia’s controversial former mayor Mary Broh, and presented updates about the Monrovia City Corporation’s work through short broadcasts, and dressed up in African-inspired fashion. One day, Bernard went to her tailor to pick up a dress she had designed for a show and found the designer both wearing it and stitching it together for another customer. She decided to go out on her own and founded her label ‘It’s Archel’.
While Bernard says Liberia has offered her great opportunities that wouldn’t be available in America, she must juggle the business and a full-time job and has found it impossible to export her clothes due to the high shipping costs. Expanding her business beyond Liberia’s shores still poses a major challenge as it does for most Liberian businesses.
“We can’t be global if it costs so much. People are not going to see the point in paying so much for a little piece from Liberia. We used to make cigarettes, we used to make cans for the goods we made here. We are so small scale here,” she says.
Chid Liberty, the founder of Liberty and Justice, Africa’s first fair-trade-certified apparel manufacturer says that although the business climate is improving, lack of access to finance and the presence of “small manufacturers that can produce international quality” remain ongoing challenges for Liberian designers and the expansion of clothing manufacturing.
“I’m actually quite proud of the job Liberia is doing to make things better but we have a long way to go,” says Liberty.
Liberia’s economy is a concession-based economy with natural resources such as rubber and iron ore making up the majority of its GDP. Critics argue the government has done little to move the nation’s economy from the old plantation style model that has dominated throughout its history.
While signs of change are visible in Monrovia, new shops and office complexes have been constructed, roads repaired, the city is a shadow of the one Bernard’s parents grew up in. Access to steady electricity and running water comes at a high price and many buildings stand in a state of disrepair.
The Wealth of Liberia, a short film shot in the 1970s during the rule of President William R. Tolbert, depicted an image of modern Monrovia and industrial development – factories manufacturing paint, cigarettes, soap, windows and cement – a place where tourists flocked and the Liberia in which her parents grew up. While Bernard acknowledges the major developmental challenges ahead for one of the world’s poorest nations and is concerned about the capacity of her business to expand beyond Liberia’s borders, she is confident she can play a role in changing the image of the small nation and first independent republic in Africa.
Inspired by Louis Vuitton’s partnership with iconic alcohol brands Moët Hennessy, Bernard hopes to create a small sewing shop and African cane juice bar in the room next door.
She also has aspirations of going global and sending Mango Rags stores to Brooklyn, Cape Town and even Maui and develop a range for Swedish multinational retail giant H&amp;M and take Liberia to the world.
“We’re still dreamin’ and working,” she says.

What Do You Do If You Can’t  Be Oprah?

It is hard to imagine that the regal-looking, Zimbabwe-born Margaret Hirsch, dressed in a power suit and elegantly going about her business, was a shorthand typist 40 years ago.
“I knew when I got fired for being pregnant, I would never work for another boss again and I never have. I had only two assets to my name: my brain and my hands,” says Hirsch.
At about the same time, her husband Allan, who was a refrigeration mechanic, saw an opportunity in selling discounted appliances, and together they started Hirsch’s. Thus began their home appliance empire in South Africa.
Today, this multiple award-winner is the Chief Operations Executive and co-founder, with her husband, of Hirsch’s, the appliance, electronic and airconditioning retail giant – from where many a South African has purchased his first fridge or oven.
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There are 12 Hirsch’s branches in the country’s KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng and Western Cape provinces, and five concept stores. Hirsch also runs international businesses and charities like the Johannesburg School for the Blind and three nursery schools in Durban for underprivileged children.
Hirsch says Hirsch’s was built on a philosophy rather than a strategy. Helping others, by giving them the opportunity to be the best they can be and becoming self-sufficient, has paid off as Hirsch has exceeded their R1 billion ($92 million) target in 2012 after starting the business with only R900 ($354).
“It is the people of Hirsch’s that has made my journey worthwhile. Every staff member of Hirsch’s has a story. To see how each one of them has developed, and become the person they are destined to be is one of the most gratifying rewards in my life,” she says, in her Meadowdale store in Johannesburg.
The reins of the company are now in the hands of Hirsch’s son, Richard, who is Managing Director. Hirsch counts it as the highlight of her career when her son and daughter Luci joined the business.
This gives Hirsch more time to spend with her four grandsons in Durban, who she visits every week. It is really important to her that her entire family is involved in the business.
Hirsch, who has been married 43 years, says that in order to stay happily married for so long, you must be sure you really love. And she says it has not been difficult working with her husband as they both have clearly-defined roles.
“Allan is responsible for the buying and marketing and I am responsible for the sales and the staff. We very rarely disagree, and we give each other our required space.”
Hirsch is still integrally involved with all aspects of the business despite her busy schedule. A regular speaker at events, she is best-known for women’s empowerment drives and community upliftment projects.
Her drive to empower women stems from her early childhood memories after her father’s death, when she was witness to her mother’s struggles and experienced being poor. She knew then that one day she would have everything she wanted; she dreamed and envisioned herself being wealthy  and empowered.
The Girls With Dignity project that’s close to her heart came about when Hirsch investigated why girls were not attending school. Hirsch and her team realized school girls were absent during their menstrual cycle. Lack of money to buy sanitary pads made it impossible for these girls to attend school when they had their periods.
“Sue Barnes of Durban developed a re-usable sanitary pad and along with various others, I am distributing these to girls throughout Africa. School attendance has improved vastly, as have the marks and pass rates of these girls,” says Hirsch.
Early in her career, despite the struggle to make ends meet in the business and the challenges, she never gave up. Her resolve just grew stronger with each obstacle. The couple once lost R5 million (about $2 million) in one afternoon after being done in by a businessman, but this could not deter them. The few ventures that did not do as well as expected were shut down and they moved on.
The tipping point for Hirsch’s came with the introduction of microwave ovens, and her training at Panasonic in Japan. This led to the setting up of the first independent microwave cooking school in South Africa by Hirsch; and its effect on the business was enormous.
Hirsch is now working on a television show Look up! that aims to give South Africans hope. She realized early in life that as a person’s self-esteem lifted, his or her ability to earn increased too, and that is what she offers her employees.
She has authored many books, including a recipe book for vegetarians and a compilation cookbook from the cooking school days.
She holidays in Zanzibar to relax, enjoys a good lentil lasagne and cherishes time with her family. She also enjoys photography, especially on their family farm in KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. But retire she never will.
“I love what I do. For me, it’s not work, it’s a way of life. I really enjoy helping staff to improve their lives and customers to choose the right appliances and furniture for their homes and am always available to help any time of the day or night,” she says.
Hirsch’s life did not start as a fairytale, but she is proof you can have a fairytale ending if you are passionate about what you do, do it better than everyone else, give more than is expected and be the change you want to see in the world.

Tag: June 2014

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