<p>When I ask petite Memory Banda whether she is married, her answer is an emphatic “No!”</p>
<p>It’s a loaded question for Banda who has spent the past few years of her young life campaigning against child marriage in Malawi. She has come to the Social Good Summit in New York in September to talk about Girls Empowerment Network Malawi (Genet) and Let Girls Lead, the organizations she works tirelessly for to stop child marriage in Malawi and beyond.</p>
<p>But she doesn’t have long to talk to me: She’s about to meet First Lady Michelle Obama, which she’s really excited about.</p>
<p>“Of course I have intentions to get married one day,” a vivacious Banda, who is almost 20, tells me. “But only when I’m done with school.” She’s keen to talk too about the career in communications – or possibly law – that she’s hoping to pursue but her current mission is more pressing: to stop child marriage in Malawi, a country with one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world.</p>
<p>Although the situation has improved there, with the banning of the practice in February last year, it is still commonplace for Malawian girls to marry very young. The legal marrying age is now 18, but with their parents’ consent, they can still marry as young as 15. Banda’s own sister was married at 11 to a man in his 30s and she now has several children. Some of her cousins too are in a similar predicament. And despite the legislation, child marriage continues – if under the radar.</p>
<p>“When I saw my peers, I was not impressed with the life they were living,” says Banda. She knew from the outset that she wanted a different path for herself and for other girls in her country and on the continent.</p>
<p><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-32025 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Memory-with-member-of-parliament-2015webready-1024x681.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="681" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Memory-with-member-of-parliament-2015webready.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Memory-with-member-of-parliament-2015webready-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Memory-with-member-of-parliament-2015webready-600x399.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Memory-with-member-of-parliament-2015webready-768x511.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p>
<p>Central to child marriage is the brutal traditional practice of kusasa fumbi, which takes place in southern Malawi. This involves the sexual initiation of young girls at a special initiation camp in their village by an older man known as a “hyena”. The man has sex with them and teaches them how to pleasure their future husbands.</p>
<p>“Of course, it’s not his or her first time. And little is known about him. He could be infected with HIV,” says Banda. This practice robs the young girls of their childhood. When they come out, they soon get pregnant or married,” she says.</p>
<p>It’s no surprise that Malawi has one of the highest rates of maternal deaths in the world. What’s more, 10% of the population is HIV-positive.</p>
<p>But thanks to the efforts of Banda and the advocacy organizations behind her, the new legislation was passed. Other steps have also been taken to spread the message and change attitudes. Much work has been done with rural chiefs to put a stop to the kusasa fumbi tradition as well as child marriage.</p>
<p>Several years ago, over 200 girls who were trained in the Chiradzulu District of southern Malawi to persuade 60 village chiefs to make and enforce by-laws to protect girls from early marriage and sexual initiation. Now men who marry girls under the age of 21 must pay penalties to the chiefs in the form of goats or their land. Parents who allow or promote marriage of their under-age daughters are also penalized.</p>
<p>So far the efforts of Banda and her colleagues have largely paid off.</p>
<p>“Two or three years ago it was really bad. But there has been a lot of change in different communities,” she says.</p>
<p>Now, initiation camps have become a “positive” educational experience, where no “sexual cleansing” takes place and where girls learn about their bodies.</p>
<p>It’s no surprise that economic drivers are often behind the choice of young girls – or their parents – for early marriage.</p>
<p>“When you encourage girls to stand on their own they will ask you, ‘but where will I get the money?’ says Banda. “But I grew up with nothing. Still, I was able to move out,” she says. “I challenge that thinking and I encourage them to think not just of now but of the future.”</p>


IMG_2019

Malawi’s Other Banda

<p>It was controversial feminist writer, Maggie Young, who in describing her generation, best captures the DNA of the millennials.</p>
<p>“We lost the genetic lottery. We graduated into terror attacks and wars. We are often more educated, experienced, informed, and digitally fluent than prior generations, yet are constantly haunted by the trauma of coming of age during the detonation of the societal structure we were born into. We will have less money to buy the material possessions that entrap us. We will have more compassion and empathy because our struggles have taught us that even the most privileged can fall from grace. Our hardships will obligate us to develop spiritual and intellectual substance. Maybe having roommates and buying our clothes at thrift stores isn’t so horrible as long as we are making a point to pursue genuine happiness.”</p>
<p>Corporates and governments are tripping over each other trying to understand Young’s generation. The manual on millennials has proven to be somewhat elusive with tons of studies on this generational group that despite reporting on some common themes, have not nailed what makes millennials tick.</p>
<p>What we do know is that the term ‘millennial’ is about as old as the average millennial, coined in 1991 by Neil Howe and William Straus, in their co-authored publication: Generations: The History of America’s Future 2584 to 2069. They described millennials as people born between 1980 and 2000. This generation is also commonly referred to as Generation Y.</p>
<p>Millennials matter because they make up the world’s largest generational group since the soon-to-retire Baby Boomers. The first cohort of millennials is in their early to mid-30s, at the beginning of their careers, and will become an invaluable engine of the global economy in decades to come.</p>
<p>Millennials matter even more in Africa.</p>
<p>The African Development Bank has reported Africa has more than 200 million people aged between 15 and 24, about 65% of the continent is made up of millennials, making it the youngest continent in the world. Demographic forecasts show that this figure will double by 2045.</p>
<p>In just four years, three out of every four people in Africa will be on average 20 years old in Africa.</p>
<p>While millennials may be dismissed as a generation obsessed with selfies, they also seem to be intent on being part of finding solutions to the world’s biggest problems.</p>
<p>The 2015 Deloitte Millennial Survey highlights millennials are tuned into the purpose of a business – what it should do – as much as they are tuned to the impact of the business – what the business is actually doing.</p>
<p>Millennials are increasingly disconnected with traditional approaches to the workplace. They are easily turned off by stiff corporate structures and working within silos. They want dynamic work environments, they are not keen on putting in the slog of years working the corporate ladder, they believe in rapid succession, and they value mobility over the bum-on-seats approach. These insights are pulled from extensive research done through a survey administered to over 4,000 graduates across 75 countries by KPMG to understand what millennials want from the workplace. Although the survey was done in 2011, the insights will continue to shape corporate talent strategies for years still.</p>
<p>What millennials want out of the work of experience is like nothing before that. Top of the list of headaches is that old reward and recognition systems aren’t retaining millennials in their positons. Millennials subscribe to “loyalty-lite”, happily hopping between employees.</p>
<p>The unparalleled access to the internet and mobile phones is part of the millennial DNA. This generation has no concept of the world before technology. They take as a given that you can have a movie theater, your next taxi ride, and your diet all in your back pocket.</p>
<p>The Wall Street Journal in Millennials: Love Them Or Let Them Go reported millennials don’t just view social networks as a communication tool but as a global language that embeds them in various communities. Interestingly, despite the uptake of social media connectedness, millennials still value family and friends even though they will overwhelmingly engage with them on social media platforms.</p>
<p>Millennials value education and are more likely to spend more time investing in their education than the previous generations. The manual on millennials is still missing but if the statistics shared by the World Economic Forum that millennials are increasingly becoming the biggest influencers in the world, that more than 50% of the world’s population is under 27 years old and rising to 70% in Africa, it needs to be written. Yesterday.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>– The writer, a millennial herself, is a senior anchor on CNBC Africa, and presents the show Young Money on the channel.</p>


Milenials_Jay-Caboz-8

The  New Biz Kids On The  Block

<p>It’s a cold winter’s night in a little village called Igueden in the Edo state of Southwestern Nigeria where a young girl lies awake, within the dimly-lit red mud walls of her home, dreading dawn.</p>
<p>She recalls a conversation with her mother years ago about this day. The vivid picture her mother had painted about her own experience had left her aghast at the pain and torture she had endured.</p>
<p>Tomorrow, it would be her turn. She was turning 12, and village tradition dictated she be ‘cleansed’ too.</p>
<p>“Today, you become a real woman,” says the young girl’s 90-year-old grandmother as she awakens.</p>
<p>Dawn has come too soon.</p>
<p>With great trepidation, she follows the elderly woman to the hut of the village doctor where 10 other girls are waiting for the same inevitable fate.</p>
<p>The older women in the village are singing and ululating. Inside, the young girl’s friends reciprocate the look of fear in her eyes. As is customary, her mother is not allowed to be around her. No mother can hear the pain of a daughter, nor fight to help her.</p>
<p>As each girl is ushered in, a cacophony of piercing screams follows at decibels louder than the women singing to purposely drown out the cries of pain.</p>
<p>In the middle of the doctor’s room is a cold round slab, smeared with blood. He motions for her to sit on the stone.</p>
<p>It feels wet. Two women proceed to tie a cloth around her eyes while another is stuffed into her mouth so she can bite into it.</p>
<p>Before being blind-folded, she just about glimpses a sharp, bloody metal object in the doctor’s hand. Fear consumes her as the women firmly hold her legs and arms to the ground.</p>
<p>In the background, the singing continues. No one hears the young girl’s muffled screams. She feels an indescribable pain between her legs.</p>
<p>And just like that, Eki Ehizogie went from being a child to ‘a real woman’, 30 years ago.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>The Naked Truth</p>
<p>There is an estimated 125 million girls and women globally living with the effects of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), reported to be most widespread in Africa and the Middle East.</p>
<p>In a historic move, the Nigerian government has outlawed the practice of FGM. The law, passed by the senate on May 5, a gesture by outgoing president Goodluck Jonathan, bans the practice involving removing a part or all of a girl’s outer sexual organs.</p>
<p>The World Health Organization describes the practice the following ways: Type I (clitoridectomy), which is removal of part or all of the clitoris; Type II (excision), the most common form which is removal of the clitoris and part or all of the labia minora (the inner vaginal lips); and Type III (infibulation), which is removal of the external genitalia and stitching of the vaginal opening.</p>
<p>A very small opening is left, about the diameter of a pencil. The practice attempts to control a woman’s sexuality, and under the pretext of purity, modesty and aesthetics. It is usually initiated and carried out by women, who see it as honor, and who fear that failing to have their daughters and granddaughters cut will socially exclude them.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>The Woman Named Eki</p>
<p>“The pain I felt can’t be described; thinking of it brings cold shivers inside me. I was circumcised, I felt incomplete and completely out of control,” says Ehizogie.</p>
<p>“My life took a complete turn, I felt wasted and hopeless.”</p>
<p>The lasting effects of that day live with her forever.</p>
<p>“I do not feel like a real woman, I feel like I was robbed of something that can never be returned to me.”</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>The Nigerian Reality</p>
<p>Nigeria reportedly has the highest number of FGM cases. The country accounts for about a quarter of circumcised females worldwide, according to UNICEF. The damaging effects of this procedure for the women may be infertility, maternal death, infections and loss of sexual pleasure.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>‘I Felt Like A Freak’</p>
<p>For women like Ehizogie, the ban is certainly good news.</p>
<p>“I never thought this day would come. There are thousands of women in remote areas living with similar experiences as me and hopefully with this new law, many innocent girls can be spared this fate,” she says.</p>
<p>Ehizogie’s teenage years were very difficult. She spent most of her time alone, intimidated at the thought of getting close to a boy.</p>
<p>“When I was in boarding school, I saw the other girls in the shower and I knew immediately that I was different. I felt like a freak,” she recalls.</p>
<p>Her’s was a Type II circumcision. Her first sexual experience conjured up memories of that fateful day.</p>
<p>“I felt an excruciating pain which almost made me pass out, I told him to stop immediately as I could not handle the pain. I thought to myself I never want to be with anyone again,” says Ehizogie.</p>
<p>She recalls her village elders calling FGM a legal rite of passage; any mother refusing to let her daughter undergo the procedure was in danger of breaking the law.</p>
<p>Ehizogie has felt different for a long time. She has gone through periods of extreme depression, which have led to suicide attempts.</p>
<p>It was immediately after her first failed sexual experience. The event was a culmination of all the self-hate and negativity she had for years.</p>
<p>“I did not want to live anymore, I could only see one way out,” she admits. She overdosed on painkillers but was discovered on the floor by chance by a neighbor. She was rushed in time to the clinic. Her recovery involved a combination of therapy and support from a new community she found at church.</p>
<p>“The mental consequences after FGM include feelings of incompleteness, fear, inferiority and suppression. Women report chronic irritability and nightmares. They have a higher risk for psychiatric and psychosomatic diseases,” says Dr Asamoah, a clinical psychologist with Lister Hospital.</p>
<p>The move by Nigeria has sparked sentiments from around the world.</p>
<p>“Global experience tells us that ultimately, it’s through changing attitudes, not just laws, that we will end FGM,” said Tanya Barron, chief executive of children’s charity Plan International, in a Reuters report.</p>
<p>Those attitudes are deep-rooted in rural communities. The pressure to be accepted is the main reason women undergo FGM.</p>
<p>“I was told by my grandmother that I was not a real woman until I had been circumcised and that is the only time I will find a husband and not bring shame to the family,” says Ehizogie, who is married with two children. These days, she works in communities providing support for girls with similar experiences.</p>
<p>“The belief that a woman has to be a virgin before she is married to a man in local communities has also led to the increase in FGM,” avers Ehizogie.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Hope and vindication</p>
<p>According to UNICEF, approximately two million girls are mutilated every year. Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia and Sudan account for 75% of all cases. The battle to end this practice has raged for years. The United Nations has declared FGM is a violation of the rights of girls and women.</p>
<p>For Ehizogie, the news about its ban brings hope and in a small way, vindication – though delayed – for the atrocity she suffered as a child.</p>


Anna-Omelchenko-Shutterstock.com_

The Children Who Become Women Too Soon

<p>Afua Osei and Yasmin Belo-Osagie were lucky they shared the same vision when over a year ago they launched She Leads Africa, a social enterprise supporting female entrepreneurs on the continent.</p>
<p>They had both previously worked for women’s causes, though in different capacities. Osei, a Ghanaian, had worked with women keen on running for Congress in the United States (US), while Belo-Osagie, whose parents hail from Nigeria and Ghana, had led the women’s mentorship initiative during her tenure at management consulting firm McKinsey in Lagos.</p>
<p>After a year of toying with the idea, they put in motion a She Leads Africa pitch competition in Lagos, inviting over 200 sound entrepreneurial ideas from African women and assessing them to provide crucial support and financing.</p>
<p><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-29837 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Yasmin-Color-Headshot-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Yasmin-Color-Headshot-200x300.jpg 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Yasmin-Color-Headshot-300x450.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Yasmin-Color-Headshot-600x900.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Yasmin-Color-Headshot-768x1152.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Yasmin-Color-Headshot.jpg 682w" sizes="(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" /></p>
<p>“Getting involved in the technology and start-up ecosystem in Accra and Lagos showed me that the need for advice and resources [among] young women wasn’t exclusive to the corporate track. Young women looking to build companies were faced with an environment that was neither friendly nor encouraging. When I connected with Yasmin, we knew this was the right time to pursue She Leads Africa,” admits Osei.</p>
<p>“I have always wanted to be an entrepreneur. However, each time I asked myself, ‘Who are the women I can look up to in this quest?’ I realized there were just not that many of them,” echoes Belo-Osagie.</p>
<p>The first hurdle they encountered was that the women they met had great business ideas but no business education to know how to execute them, especially when it came to sourcing funding.</p>
<p>Other areas of concern for the founders continue to be stereotyping and networking issues. They saw that in Africa, small and medium enterprises are headed by female entrepreneurs who believe they can only go so far.</p>
<p>“We want people to understand that greater female participation in the economy is a good thing and it’s not just a moral argument. It’s a developmental and economic one,” says Belo-Osagie.</p>
<p>In their own lives, the cofounders have donned many professional hats. But all roads finally led them to Lagos.</p>
<p>Belo-Osagie had varying interests (law, finance, journalism) and explored them at college. She graduated cum laude in history from Princeton University in the US.</p>
<p>“I also had interests in non-academic work and soon made my way to Le Cordon Bleu [famous culinary school] in London and Paris, and then went off to work in Hong Kong at the Mandarin Oriental,” she says.</p>
<p>After that, she joined McKinsey as a business analyst in Lagos, leaving it eventually to focus on She Leads Africa.</p>
<p>“I am not driven by money,” says Belo-Osagie. “I am driven by the opportunity to solve interesting problems related to Africa. I would also like to get into public policy one day.”</p>
<p>Osei on the other hand graduated cum laude from Allegheny College in the US, and served as a political consultant providing strategy and communications expertise to political campaigns across the US.</p>
<p>Mid-way through the political campaigning, she also served as a Fulbright Scholar in Malaysia and worked for the US’ First Lady Michelle Obama in her research and communications teams.</p>
<p>She took time off to pursue a Master’s in Public Policy and Master’s in Business Administration from the University of Chicago and thereafter moved to Lagos to work for a management consulting firm.</p>
<p>“I am passionate about business and social innovation, its ability to empower and unite people to create value for a bigger vision,” says Osei.</p>
<p>They focused the pitch competition on four key groups: young entrepreneurs, investors, impact-driven foundations and high net-worth individuals, offering 10 finalists a platform to grow their existing networks and gain industry-specific knowledge.</p>
<p>Cherae Robinson, CEO of Rare Customs &amp; Tastemakers Africa, who emerged competition-winner with $10,000 in support of her business, says She Leads Africa closes a critical gap for Africa-focused female entrepreneurs.</p>
<p><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-29838 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Afua-BW-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Afua-BW-200x300.jpg 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Afua-BW-300x450.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Afua-BW-600x900.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Afua-BW-683x1024.jpg 683w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Afua-BW.jpg 682w" sizes="(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" /></p>
<p>“The mentorship, the confidence, funding and continued support I have received after the competition has contributed to my fearlessness in building a multimillion dollar business,” says Robinson.</p>
<p>Taffi Woolward, CEO&amp; Co-founder of Thando’s, also a finalist, says through She Leads Africa, she was invited to present her company at the Diaspora Demo Day held at the World Bank in Washington DC.</p>
<p>She Leads Africa has aggressive pan-African plans and for the young founders fronting it, there is no better time for it than now.</p>


‘Who Are The Women To look Up To?’

<p>This generation of young African women is the most ambitious yet. They are eager to build industries, reform societies, save lives, rewrite history, and transform the continent.</p>
<p>Our annual “20 Young Power African Women” list illuminates the brightest stars and Africa’s most outstanding female game changers. We enlisted a group of young, professional African women to help identify the most innovative, courageous, daring and successful young women aged 45 and under. It is a subjective list, no doubt, but it is the closest you will get to a definitive list.</p>
<p>Meet the 2013 class of 20 Young Power Women in Africa: the continent’s emerging power brokers, the Amazons to watch, and the custodians of tomorrow.</p>
<h5>Isabel Dos Santos</h5>
<h5>Angolan. Investor</h5>
<p>The daughter of Angola’s President, Jose Eduardo Dos Santos is Africa’s richest woman. She is also one of the continent’s most powerful businesswomen. Through her various holding companies, she controls a 25% stake in Angolan mobile telecom operator Unitel, a 25% stake in Angola’s Banco BIC, 25% of ZON Optimus, a listed Portuguese cable TV company, and just under 20% of Banco BPI, one of Portugal’s largest publicly traded banks. She is also partnering with Sonae, Portugal’s largest retailer, to launch 5 new food hypermarkets in Angola in 2014.</p>
<h5>Mimi Alemayehou</h5>
<h5>Ethiopian. Executive Vice</h5>
<h5>President of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC)</h5>
<p><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5864" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_7486-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" /></p>
<p>In 2010 U.S. President Barack Obama nominated Ethiopia-born Mimi Alemayehou as the Executive Vice President of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the U.S. government’s development finance institution. She helps manage OPIC’s $16 billion war chest, channeling American capital to fund investment opportunities in emerging markets. Prior to her OPIC appointment, Alemayehou served as the United States Executive Director at the African Development Bank.</p>
<h5>Lupita Nyong’o</h5>
<h5>Kenyan. Actress and Filmmaker</h5>
<p>Nyong’o is a Kenyan actress and filmmaker who made her Hollywood debut in acclaimed film director Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” as Patsey. Nyong’o was born in Mexico, raised in Kenya and educated in the U.S. She is a graduate of Yale University’s School of Drama. In 2009, the breakout actress was also the lead in MTV’s award-winning drama series, Shuga. Nyong’o’s cousin, Isis Nyong’o was named one of Forbes 20 Youngest Power Women in Africa in 2011. Another cousin, Tavia Nyong’o, is a professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.</p>
<h5>Hadeel Ibrahim</h5>
<h5>Sudanese. Mo Ibrahim Foundation</h5>
<p>Hadeel Ibrahim is the daughter of Sudanese-born British mobile telecoms billionaire Mo Ibrahim. She is the founding Executive Director of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, which was established in 2006 to support leadership and good governance in Africa. She also serves on the Boards of the Mary Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice and the African Governance Institute (AGI).</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<h5>Minoush Abdel-Meguid</h5>
<h5>Egyptian. Private Equity Investor, Entrepreneur, Investment Banker</h5>
<p>The Egyptian-born investment banker is the cofounder of Union Capital, an Egyptian investment firm primarily focused on small and medium-sized enterprises. Abdel-Meguid is also founding president of the Egyptian Young Bankers Association, an organization that mentors young banking professionals.</p>
<h5>Monica Musonda</h5>
<h5>Zambian. Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Java Foods</h5>
<p>Musonda is the founder of Java Foods, a Zambia-based food processing company that manufactures the eeZee brand of Instant Noodles. Musonda previously worked with Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, as the director of legal and corporate affairs at Dangote Group, where she led a project to build a cement plant in Zambia. She currently serves on the Boards of Dangote Industries Zambia Limited and the Central Bank of Zambia. Musonda is also the Chairperson of Kwacha Pension Trust Fund, Zambia’s largest single employer pension fund. She is an Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellow and was named a 2013 Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.</p>
<h5>Lindiwe Mazibuko</h5>
<h5>South African. Politician &amp; Parliamentary Leader for Democratic Alliance (DA)</h5>
<p>Mazibuko, 33, is a Parliamentary Leader for the Democratic Alliance (MP for North Durban) and Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly in South Africa. As the country’s fourth youngest parliamentarian, Mazibuko is already being touted as a future leader of the Democratic Alliance. Mazibuko was named South Africa’s Most Influential Woman in 2012 and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2013.</p>
<h5>Tara Fela-Durotoye</h5>
<h5>Nigerian. Founder, House Of Tara</h5>
<p>The Nigerian-born entrepreneur and lawyer is the founder of House Of Tara, Nigeria’s leading beauty and cosmetics company. House of Tara develops a wide range of African-themed beauty products and perfumes and also operates Nigeria’s foremost beauty academy. In 2013, Fela-Durotoye was nominated as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (WEF).</p>
<h5>Claire Akamanzi</h5>
<h5>Rwandan. Chief Operating Officer, Rwanda Development Board</h5>
<p>Akamanzi, 34, is the Chief Operating Officer of the Rwandan Development Board (RDB), a government institution tasked with accelerating economic growth and development in Rwanda by enabling private sector growth. Akamanzi has had a successful career in public service, serving as Rwanda’s commercial diplomat in London and as a trade negotiator in Geneva for the Rwandan government at the World Trade Organization. She was also previously the Deputy Director-General of the Rwanda Investment and Export Promotion Agency (RIEPA).</p>
<h5>PROSCOVIA Alengot Oromait</h5>
<h5>Ugandan. Member Of Parliament</h5>
<p>Proscovia Oromait, 20, is the youngest parliamentarian in Africa. In 2012 she was elected Member of Parliament for Usuk County, Katakwi District in Uganda. Her father, Michael Oromait, served as the MP for the same Parliamentary seat before his death in July 2012. She is a member of Uganda’s ruling National Resistance Movement party.</p>
<h5>Sibongile Sambo</h5>
<h5>South African. Chief Executive Officer and Founder of SRS Aviation</h5>
<p>Sambo is the founder and Managing Director of SRS (Sibongile Rejoice Sambo) Aviation – the first black female owned aviation company in South Africa. SRS is an integrated provider of private aviation services offering South African and international clients VIP Charter, tourist charter and helicopter services. The company also provides maintenance, sales and fleet management services to private jet owners.</p>
<h5>Vera Songwe</h5>
<h5>Cameroonian. Country Director, World Bank, Senegal</h5>
<p>Vera Songwe, a Cameroonian national, serves as the World Bank’s Country Director for Senegal, Cape Verde, Gambia, Mauritania and Guinea-Bissau. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institute with the Global Economy and Development and Africa Growth Initiative.</p>
<h5>Angellah Kariuki</h5>
<h5>Tanzanian. Politician</h5>
<p>Kariuki, 37, is a Special seat Member of Tanzania’s Parliament and the country’s Deputy Minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs.</p>
<div id="attachment_5969" style="width: 209px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5969" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-5969" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/83362281-199x300.jpg" alt="" width="199" height="300" /><p id="caption-attachment-5969" class="wp-caption-text">Artist Wangechi Mutu attends the 2008 Whitney Museum of American Art&#8217;s gala</p></div>
<h5>Wangechi Mutu</h5>
<h5>Kenyan. Artist and Sculptor</h5>
<p>Considered one of the most important contemporary African artists of recent years, Mutu’s first major solo exhibition in the U.S., Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, opened at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in March 2013. Mutu’s work has achieved much global acclaim with exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Miami Art Museum, Tate Modern in London, the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York, Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, Germany the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Her first solo exhibition at a major North American museum opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario in March 2010.</p>
<h5>Ola Orekunrin</h5>
<p><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5966" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/1-11-300x201.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="201" /></p>
<h5>Nigerian. Medical Doctor &amp; Founder, The Flying Doctors</h5>
<p>Orekunrin, 25, is founder and Managing Director of Flying Doctors Nigeria Ltd., an air ambulance service based in Lagos, Nigeria. Orekunrin’s company is the first air ambulance service in West Africa to provide urgent helicopter, airplane ambulance and evacuation services for critically injured people. She is a 2013 New Voices Fellow at the Aspen Institute and was named a Young Global Leader in 2013 by the World Economic Forum.</p>
<p><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5972" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Shot-02-CF234984-225x300.jpg" alt="" width="225" height="300" /></p>
<h5>Rapelang Rabana</h5>
<h5>South African. Entrepreneur</h5>
<p>One of Africa’s most recognizable young entrepreneurs, Rabana, 29, is the CEO and founder of Cape Town-based Yeigo Communications, which develops software for telecoms-related services including Voice over IP, instant messaging, SMS messaging and push email services. In 2008, Telfree, a Swiss mobile telecommunications firm, acquired a 51% stake in Yeigo. In December 2012 she founded Rekindle Learning, a company that provides adaptive mobile learning solutions.</p>
<h5>Folake Folarin-Coker</h5>
<h5>Nigerian. Fashion Designer</h5>
<p>Coker is the founder of Tiffany Amber, one of Africa’s leading fashion labels. She is the first African-based designer to showcase for two consecutive seasons at New York Fashion Week. In 2009, she won Designer of the Year at African Fashion International in Johannesburg, South Africa followed by Fashion Brand of the Year in 2011 at the Arise Fashion Week in Lagos, Nigeria.</p>
<h5>Valentina da Luz Guebuza</h5>
<h5>Mozambiquan. Investor</h5>
<p>The 33 year-old daughter of Mozambique’s President Armando Guebuza heads Focus 21 Management &amp; Development, a large family-owned investment holding company with interests in banking, telecommunications, fisheries, transport, mining and property. Focus 21 owns significant stakes in Beira Grain Terminal and Chinese Pay TV Company StarTimes’ operations in Mozambique.</p>
<p><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5971" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/valentina_guebuza_20120505_32-Edit-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" /></p>
<h5>NoViolet Bulawayo</h5>
<h5>Zimbabwean. Author</h5>
<p>Zimbabwean-born author NoViolet Bulawayo is the first Black African female and the first Zimbabwean to be shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker prize for her debut novel “We Need New Names”. She is the author of the short story Hitting Budapest (2010), which won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing. NoViolet Bulawayo is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University in California.</p>
<h5>Amini Kajunju</h5>
<h5>Democratic Republic of Congo. President &amp; CEO,</h5>
<h5>Africa-America Institute</h5>
<div id="attachment_5967" style="width: 226px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5967" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-5967" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/181837445-216x300.jpg" alt="" width="216" height="300" /><p id="caption-attachment-5967" class="wp-caption-text">Amini Kajunju speaks during the Africa-America Institute 60th Anniversary Awards Gala at New York Hilton on September 25, 2013 in New York City.</p></div>
<p>A native of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Amini Kajunju is the President &amp; CEO of the Africa-America Institute, and the first African woman to serve at the helm of the oldest non-profit organization of its kind in the United States. Kajunju joined the Africa-America Institute in October 2012 from the New York-based Workshop in Business Opportunities (WIBO) where she had served as Executive Director for 10 years. Under her leadership, Kajunju has bolstered the organization’s programming and served more entrepreneurs than any other institution of a similar size in New York City.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>


20 Young Power Women In Africa 2013

<p>Under the scorching African sun, in Sudan, a seven-year-old boy stands at attention. His fragile frame struggles to hold the AK47. The blank stare on his face betrays the atrocities he has lived through so far. At the command of his superior he runs into the bush. His mission is simple: no prisoners; kill them all. The stutter of the firing gun drowns out the screams. This is one of millions of boys who will never know what it feels like to play with Lego and toy trucks. With each passing day his hardening heart stifles a distant dream of a joyful childhood.</p>
<p>That boy, Emmanuel Jal, now in his thirties, has a made a career by telling his stories though music as a hip-hop artist. But the memories of death and destruction stick with him like the bullets in the chamber of an assault rifle.</p>
<p>“Everything I do today is mostly inspired by my past. I consider myself a soldier, but I fight with a microphone instead of an AK47. The battle that I’m fighting now is not because I am bitter; I am fighting to create change and I’m using dialogue and ideas instead of using force.”</p>
<p>In many ways Jal is still one of the lost children. He doesn’t know when or where he was born, but he thinks it was in the early 1980s. At the age of seven, after both his parents died, Jal went to a refugee camp in Ethiopia where he was recruited by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).</p>
<p>“Just as we approached the SPLA training facility, some members jumped out of the bush and started beating us… The next day we were shown how to attack towns, make weapons, make houses for ourselves and how to cook. The training was harsh and I thought that once we had finished I was going to kill my trainer.”</p>
<p>When Jal was around 13 years old, the SPLA began to turn against each other. During this time, a group of them plotted their escape. The plan was to walk to a place called Waad. They thought it would take one month, but it took three. Only 16 of them survived.</p>
<p>Jal was taken in by a British aid worker who smuggled him into Nairobi. After her death, he was on his own again. The night terrors of his time in Sudan became worse and often left Jal on his knees. He may have left Sudan; but it never left him. Although he had dreams of being a pilot or a doctor, music was where he found peace.</p>
<p>In 2005, Jal released his first album Gua, meaning peace. The album focused on life as a child soldier, government corruption and the future of Africa. Although Jal’s music connected with many; it was too real for others.</p>
<p>“Music with a message behind it is very dangerous because you are educating the public; you are letting people know their rights… The system is scared of highly intelligent people who have more information about life because once they know, they can’t turn away.”</p>
<p>Jal’s music has seen him perform alongside the likes of Bob Geldof, the Soweto Gospel Choir and Josh Groban. In 2008, Jal performed in London for Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday.</p>
<p>In 2008, a documentary on his life, War Child, received international praise. It was shown at various festivals including the Tribeca film festival where it won the Cadillac Audience Choice Award.</p>
<p>From child soldier to musician and activist, Jal has one mission. It’s highlighted in the lyrics to his song War Child: “I believe I’ve survived for a reason to tell my story to touch lives&#8230;”</p>
<p>Through his music he is doing just that. With the mic as his weapon, he fires words of hope for those who suffer in silence.</p>


Music To Dull The Nightmares

<p>Like many 21-year-olds, Chibundu Onuzo is nervous about her exam results. The Nigerian-born-and-bred Onuzo has just finished her final year of a history degree at King’s College, London. Her favorite place? The British Library in London.</p>
<p>The sense is, though, that she is not just killing time before fighting her way into the scrum of graduate jobs because Onuzo has already been recognized as one of the brightest literary talents to emerge from Africa in recent years. Her début novel, the Spider King’s Daughter, is a love story that sees the privileged, fenced-off world of Nigeria’s wealthy collide with poverty, as the teenage daughter of a rich family enters into a romance with a street hawker. In many ways it a well-worn love story, albeit one with a unique flavor.</p>
<p>“It’s the setting that gives every love story a context. I don’t think that can be taken away from the story. The background shapes their relationship,” says Onuzo.</p>
<p>That background is the teeming, sweaty, lunatic megalopolis of Lagos. Nigeria’s commercial capital, home to 20 million souls, who seem to live at a pace and density unlike anywhere else in the world. Every inch of the city, which sprawls across damp islands, heaves with life. It rises into skyscrapers and dives into battered, corrugated iron shacks. It is a place that has a unique intensity of detail, clogged with traffic and the fumes of thousands of diesel generators that take the place of a national grid.</p>
<p>“What I like about Lagos is the chaos,” Onuzo says. “[State Governor] Fashola would not be pleased. There’s a creativity. You just feel people are&#8230; I don’t know&#8230; You just feel people are expressing themselves.”</p>
<p>Onuzo has lived in Britain for the last seven years. The distance from the exhausting grind of Lagos has given Onuzo a sharper focus on her hometown.</p>
<p>“My Lagos is a very specific Lagos. I’m writing from memory. I went back while I was writing it but I wasn’t living there. The things I was looking for were very specific. I was writing about hawkers and that was where my eyes were trained on. It’s a specific Lagos, a slice of what I’ve seen,” she says.</p>
<p>The protagonist’s role, as one of the young men and women who dart between cars in the city’s gridlock to sell water, ice-creams, belts, ties and cheap plastic goods straight out of cargo containers from China, was cemented by an early experience.</p>
<p>As a child, Onuzo was encouraged to enter an essay competition by her mother and went to visit a young hawker.</p>
<p>“She was a child, 16 or 17. What struck me was that she didn’t seem to have any more prospects. She could look forward to the next five or 10 years of her life, that was what she could see herself doing. It just felt like a total waste, someone who is so young. It stayed somewhere in my mind,” says Onuzo.</p>
<p>Lagos’ socioeconomic inequalities form the backdrop to the romance, the great divisions between the rich and the poor—and the politics of inequity—are central to the narrative. Onuzo did not set out to write a political novel, but politics in Nigeria is unavoidable for those with education and a voice.</p>
<p>“Oh yeah, because politics is why you don’t have lights. It’s why you don’t have working water. I mean, here [in London] you have your basic commodities or whatever you need. When you wake up [in Nigeria] there is a constant reminder that the political system has failed you in everything you see. So that’s why it’s very close to the skin,” she says.</p>
<p>“I know there are a lot of other African writers who have reacted against the pressure to be the political voices of their time, like the greats—Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, they were involved in their writing. They were engaged every day in writing polemics about Nigeria. There is a new generation of African writers who say ‘look, we want to write about other things&#8230;’ For me, I think it’s hard to avoid writing about Nigeria without talking about politics.”</p>
<p>Achebe and Soyinka, both defining voices of their generation and great political authors, cast long shadows on Nigerian and African literature. The pair are the yardstick by which other writers are measured, even though the context that they worked in is no longer the Africa that the current generation recognizes. The tyrannies of colonial rule, then the civil strife and military coups of the post-colonial era have given way to new disappointments and new hopes. However, the overriding pessimism and despair, that is a feature of the Nobel laureates’ canon, is hard to escape.</p>
<p>“They had such dreams, such high hopes after independence. You had the civil war and everybody said ‘what is this?’ Coup after coup. And then, you can understand why they just kind of give up,” Onuzo says.</p>
<p>“I’m 21, I’ve only been politically conscious for what— four years? And some of my peers have already given up hope in Nigeria. I can understand Achebe. After 40 years you can kind of cut him some slack for going: ‘This country!’ But yes, they were all optimistic at [the dawn of] independence in 1960. Every generation starts off with hope.”</p>
<p>2010 saw Nigeria celebrate the 50th anniversary of its independence with a fanfare and promises of its future greatness. The significance is muted for this young generation.</p>
<p>“I’ve not been alive for 50 years. “The Nigeria I know has been worse than it is now&#8230; People from my generation might be more hopeful. They are not seeing Nigeria from a 50-year period. They are seeing a 12-year period [since the transition to democratic rule in 1999]. There was a time in Lagos where there were strikes. I tell people I didn’t grow up in a war zone but I saw dead bodies on the side of the road when I was a child. Things have gotten better, slowly, and certainly not fast enough, but they have,” Onuzo says.</p>
<p>“There’s a different bad guy now,” she adds. “The military guys are gone, or at least they’re all wearing civilian clothes now. So you know, it’s a different fight.”</p>
<p>Politics, though, is her personal interest. Onuzo insists that she feels no pressure to write polemic, or to be worthy. She understands, she says, that being African, a woman and a writer means that she will become known as an ‘African female writer’—that typecasting is a necessary evil of getting published and shifting copies.</p>
<p>African contemporary literature does not, as a genre, have the same level of global recognition as, for example, writing from the Indian subcontinent, but that is changing as more stories from the continent become told, according to the Zimbabwean-born publisher and deputy editor of Granta Magazine, Ellah Allfrey. Much like Indian and Pakistani writing, which burst into bookshops in the West, becoming “less foreign” for consumers. The worthier, more literary authors blazed a trail for others, which allowed others to find markets for more commercial work or genre fiction.</p>
<p>“If you have more writers from Africa or the diaspora being published, you are going to get more stories,” Allfrey says. “You can’t solve the problem with any kind of prescriptive way. You can’t say you can’t write about child soldiers, because actually Africa has child soldiers. We have poverty. We also have these other stories. What I always say is that I’m waiting for the African sex and shopping novel because then I know that we’ve arrived. Because then we’ve moved away from that quite, highbrow literary style.”</p>
<p>“Publishers and editors have a large role to play,” she adds. “It means publishers being braver, and trusting the fact that the readers are smart and want more, and the readers wanting more of these stories, having access to more of these stories. But also the writers themselves saying ‘this is what I want to write, so here you are’.”</p>
<p>International agents are, she says, starting to recognize the potential market for African literature and are “hovering up” writers.</p>
<p>For the time being, the success of writers like Onuzo is an important marker.</p>
<p>“She was just spotted as this amazing talent and that was because nobody had read this love story set in Lagos before,” Allfrey says. “That’s the great advantage that African writers have, that there are a whole bunch of stories that readers in the English language haven’t read and so agents and publishers want to pick those up.”</p>
<p>Onuzo’s next book begins in the troubled Niger Delta, with its protagonists moving, of course, to Lagos—“just because Lagos is Lagos. There’s definitely enough to keep me in stories for at least five books,” she says.</p>
<p>For the time being, she is trying to avoid the sense of having made it as a writer.</p>
<p>“It sounds so terrible. I’ve made it at 21. What am I supposed to do next? I’ve written a book, and by no means a perfect book. A very first novel book. There are a lot of flaws in it. I’m just starting out.”</p>
<p>In the meantime, there are exam results to collect.</p>


Tag: Young

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