A Gender Equality Activist

As a Gender Expert, I worked to ensure fairness and equality between women and men, girls and boys to access resources, responsibilities and opportunities, I spent a considerable number of years of my career advising national and regional institutions, coordinating national and regional advocacy programmes on gender equality and advocating for gender sensitive laws, policies, structures and programmes. As a Gender and Organizational Development Specialist (International Labour Organization certified) I managed the Africa Regional Office and the Women’s Land Link Africa Project Manager at COHRE, I led many gender analysis, gender audits, gender sensitive advocacy, capacity building, monitoring and evaluation and women’s empowerment initiatives for different organizations and companies in more than 40 African Countries including Cameroun, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia among others.

I also contributed to the women, peace and security agenda through my engagements when I worked for over a decade with the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) in Ghana. KAIPTC was a groundbreaking place for me from a gendered perspective as I broke the glass ceiling of becoming the only female on the seven-member Executive Management Committee, the only female Director among four Directors of Departments and the second female Director in the history of the institution from 2015 to 2020. With my certification as a Gender Advisor from the Folke Benadotte Academy instituted by the Government of Sweden, I am happy to assist you with gender audit, analysis, policy development and project development and implementation.

To bring these experiences to bear, I Co-Founded the Initiative for Gender Equality and Development in Africa (IGED-Africa, a dutifully registered non-profit organization. As the Executive Director for IGED-Africa, I have strategically led it to contribute to transforming lives and societies through promoting and advancing gender equality and sustainable development on the Continent. Building on this, I also founded the GenderLenz Afrique Consult - a consultancy firm, focused on promoting inclusion, diversity and women’s leadership in all spheres of life from the community to the boardroom. I also founded the Resource Hub for Development, Africa (REHUD, Africa) aimed at harnessing simple and available tools, skills and resources to train and equip young people to take charge of the future towards a sustainable individual and societal development.

Through this, I am able to support individuals, institutions and governments to advance human rights and gender equality, integrate and mainstream gender and implement gender and leadership perspectives into/for businesses, places of work and labour related issues. Such processes, I can confidently say, have very positive impact on businesses and companies as effective gender inclusion and diverse workforce that promotes employee engagement and job satisfaction. This allows companies and institutions to more than easily attract and retain the best talent, leading to an increased productivity and opportunities.