The Funke Akindele Playbook: 12 Lessons on Building A Powerful Brand
Before Funke Akindele became one of Nigeria’s most commercially successful filmmakers, she was a secondary school student playing Bisi on I Need to Know. That role in the UNFPA-sponsored sitcom in 1998 was the beginning of a career that would stretch across acting, television, film, production and entrepreneurship. Nearly three decades later, Funke is not […]
Wangari Muchiri: Building the Systems, Pipelines, and Policies That Will Power Africa’s Clean Energy Future
Wangari Muchiri has a question she has been asking since childhood and it has shaped everything she has built. Why do some communities thrive while others stay in the dark? For Wangari, that question was never abstract. Growing up, she saw energy not as a sector but as a daily reality, the difference between a […]
Ntsiki Biyela: The Rural Girl From Mahlabathini Who Became South Africa’s First Black Female Winemaker and Built a Global Brand Named After Her Grandmother
Ntsiki Biyela grew up in Mahlabathini, a rural village in Zululand, where she milked cows, grazed livestock, and was raised by her grandmother in a household built on love and hard work. She had never tasted wine. She had never imagined she would one day make it. Then a scholarship changed everything. In 1998, South […]
“When You Grow Up, I Will Marry You”: The Ghanaian MP’s Comment and How We Normalised the Sexualisation of African Girls
Hon. Yakubu Mohammed, 37-year-old Member of Parliament for Ahafo Ano South East, was addressing a group of primary school pupils visiting Parliament House in Ghana. These were children on a school excursion, young girls and boys brought to their country’s legislature to learn about governance, to see democracy in practice, to imagine what their futures […]
Brenda Msangi-Kinemo: Building Institutions, Opening Doors, and Governing at the Highest Levels So Other Women Can Follow
There are leaders who hold seats at the table and then there are leaders who change what happens at the table entirely. Brenda Msangi-Kinemo is firmly in the second category. She is the Chief Executive Officer of CCBRT, one of East Africa’s largest specialised healthcare institutions and the first Tanzanian and first woman to hold […]
The Invisible Tax: How Water Scarcity Is Stealing Time, Health, and Futures From African Women and Girls
In nearly 80% of households across sub-Saharan Africa without piped water, the work of collecting water falls to women and girls. Not because they chose it. Because it was assigned to them — by social norms, household hierarchies, and a water infrastructure deficit that has never been adequately addressed. Before school. Before breakfast. Sometimes before […]
18 African Diaspora Women Leading the World’s Boldest Ideas
Every year, African Women’s Day gives us a reason to pause and celebrate the women moving the continent forward, but this year, we’re widening the lens because “moving Africa forward” doesn’t always look like staying home. Sometimes it looks like a Lagos-raised engineer designing flight paths for NASA. A Kenyan-born nurse rebuilding disability care in […]
The Future of Feminist Organisations Depends on More Than One Woman: A Case for Co-Leadership
There is a particular kind of dissonance that feminist organisations have lived with for a long time and not always named directly. We build movements around the redistribution of power. We write strategies about dismantling hierarchy. We publish reports on the underrepresentation of women in leadership and the structural barriers that keep them out and […]
Dr. Naike Moshi: Building the Ecosystem African Women Need to Rise Fully, Personally, Professionally, and Economically
Dr. Naike Moshi has a question she has been asking for years and it has shaped everything she has built. If African women are this qualified, this capable, and this ready, why are they still not in the room? The answer she found was not about competence. It was about visibility, access, confidence, and the […]
18 Nigerian Women Leading The Charge in Public Service
When most people think about power in Nigeria, they think about the men in the room. The ones with the titles on the door and the cameras at the gate, but spend five minutes looking at who is actually running things, who is rebuilding the institutions, fixing the systems, making the hard calls, and showing […]