Conversation with Sekai Kuvarika, CEO, CZI
I will start by giving you my overall feeling about women’s economic empowerment especially as I think about women’s participation in business in its various facets, be it business leadership, ownership, key professions etc. Among other things, I think we are held back by what I call the cultural/societal/family bureaucracy and this bureaucracy operates through norms and socialisations. Even in the face of enabling policy and legislation, women still need approvals from this bureaucracy which has made the barriers for women, systemic and structural on several fronts. Women need a very strong sense of self determination which will involve to a very large extent breaking from the norms and socialisations that give this cultural bureaucracy its power. We need to give ourselves the permission to do what we need to do to get ahead. No one is coming to give us that not even the law.
What the 2024 International Women’s Month theme “Inspire Inclusion”, means to me.
Inspiring inclusion to me means a few things including:
Amplify, break new ground, demonstrate, show and tell, facilitate
Create the opportunities to demonstrate that it is possible to work through the bottlenecks, limitations and some of the challenges that limit women’s participation in leadership and other key roles.
Do what you do so well that others, both men and women, can see that women can actually excel at leadership.
Amplify the successes of women and amplify the efforts that are being made to create opportunities for women.
Identify and seize opportunities to create new avenues for women to rise and be counted.
Be deliberate and intentional with the policies and practices that create institutions that will make a meaningful contribution to raising more women leaders. And when I talk about leading it can be positional, professional, intellectual, ideological/opinion etc as all these influence the fabric of society and economic activity.
Number of Women CEO in CZI and listed entities
Looking at the listed entities alone tells a story as we have no female CEO at all on the bourse. Looking at the manufacturing sector, we are still counting but I would like to guess that less than 10 percent in the large entities and less than 30 percent in smaller entities.
If it were up to me the picture would show some progress from where we were ten , twenty years ago. It should show that we have more female CEOs and executives. But having said that , I also think that the rate of enterprise development , which is new companies coming up would also expand the number of women to include in leadership because if we had fewer new companies coming up, this would indicate that the opportunities for women are growing slowly. The opportunities will come from the deliberate actions that we take and the rate of increase of business entities.
Progress on Equal pay for Equal work
Most companies work with salary structures and the pay structures seem to be gender neutral and also guided by NECs to comply with provisions of the labour act, however at the top where a lot is based on negotiations, pay outcomes are a product of these negotiations. Salaries are a confidential issue so there is a difficulty in making this judgement especially at managerial or executive level, however I can say that anecdotally, we are probably not as good as our male counterparts in driving a hard bargain. You have just given me an area that we need to enquire further on and to understand and I hope we can draw some of these insights from organisations like IPC and such HR and research organisations.
Impact of cultural stereotypes and beliefs
As I mentioned in my opening reflections, the prospective women candidates also place limitations on themselves through seeking certain approvals from society. However, the fact that we have less women in leadership also seems to play on those hiring as it then seems that it is normal that at a senior level the organisations become male and when having to hire women it’s like you are going against the norm and need to think twice or measure the woman twice as it were.
It affects those hiring more than those being hired, those hiring feel they are taking a risk, departing from the norm as dictated by the stereotypes.
Also, I always think about how policies and legislation can fully address what are essentially products of ideas, practices and beliefs in society more than deliberate injustice, hence the stereotypes. Can a law delete the stereotypes from our psyche, I do not think so. The law should be assisted by interventions that have access to the social spaces like the church, family, communities etc where mindsets need to shift.
Training and preparation of women for Board positions
Getting to board positions requires action from across the board. In the first instance I would say as women we need to meticulously brand and package ourselves for the market and for me this involves a conscious process of reviewing who we are becoming and who we have become as a sum total of our qualifications, experience, talent/gifts, uniqueness, values etc. We then need to be able to brand ourselves and package it in a way that the right audiences can consume and know that we have value to bring to the boards. On the training front, I think that a focus on strategy capabilities is very important hopefully that will become more and more available to aspiring women.
Growth of women led businesses in the country
We can’t run away from the fact that as women leaders we have more to prove than our male counterparts. We are always under scrutiny in our style of leadership and even our capabilities. I would say lets stay focused and deliver beyond expectations and beyond perception and stereotypes. Women leaders need to keep their professional networks alive and active so that they continue to draw, inspiration, strength and insights from those networks. I would also add that we need to spend more time in the same spaces as male business leaders, do not limit your network. We read the same books with these men, we went to the same universities etc and therefore should have the same capabilities, we just need to overcome the societal, religious and cultural limitations around us.
I would say that we have seen an increase in the number of women starting new businesses. There are a growing number of business communities for women and for me the growth of these communities means that women are starting their one companies. We are finding women in SMEs and other sectors like agro processing, in fashion, in mining, solar energy, in construction, engineering , security etc. While there is an expansion in the number of women businesses, the question for me is, does this increase translate into actual value. The tendency in that we have more women in the SMEs sector and more men leading larger enterprises and there is a story to that.
The pathways to entrepreneurship inform where women will end up. In the C-Suit pathway, which is dominated by men and how that pathway works is through management buyouts of the entity that they work in. They may buy out an investor and if you are in the C-Suite you have an opportunity to participate in the new entity. The other is through share participation and for that again if you are not part of senior management as a woman, you can’t participate. The other is when people in senior management come together to raise funds to acquire companies that are on the market. A lot of these networks are male , with very few women participating in these. The other is the professions pathway where people who have worked in professional positions, for example in production open a manufacturing company because they have the expertise in that area. However, again, in many companies, the most senior management roles are male, but if we had more women in these roles, then these opportunities would open up for them. This pathway also happens in other professions like accountancy, the legal profession etc. While there are a few of these female led firms, the majority of them are male dominated.
Support for women in Business
At CZI we have started a network, which has a slow start by the way. It is called the WIN platform (Women in Industry Network) and through this we are going to be having forums, create networks, connections and business relationships among women but more importantly equip and inspire other women into leadership. We are also in a strategic partnership with the Women Owned Business Trust (WOBT) to connect women entrepreneurs to market opportunities within the CZI membership. We will be coming up with more interventions that focus on women’s economic empowerment at several levels. In a nutshell, we need to increase the scale and scope of what we are doing.
We also need to provide more female role models for our children to emulate. We also need to provide more interaction between our children and female professionals so that these messages can continue to be shared and our girls are inspired to emulate them. We should celebrate women, not just in March, but throughout the year. Women have done a lot and contributed to the world that we know today. If we could spotlight a particular profession each month and identify the women within that profession to celebrate, so that they inspire others, that is one way that we can keep these possibilities top of mind in terms of women’s empowerment.
We have to take this issue as a personal obligation. So if you see an opportunity that could be of benefit to another woman, let them know. If you have access to an opportunity or you know where such exist, share with other women. We can also commit to mentoring, nurturing and investing in other women by capacitating them, hiring them, buying from them supporting their businesses and promoting the cause of women’s empowerment.
My Parting Shot
There is a difference between who you are and what you are. Do not let what you are today stop you from recognising who you are and who you are becoming. I am a CEO at CZI but that is not who I am, it does not tell you enough about my professional identity and this is an identity which the job description cannot deliver, it can only be defined and projected by me.
This is a very complex issue that is centuries old and has several dimensions, my views are a glimpse of part of some of the things we need to consider.