The theme of this year's International Women's Day is #AccelerateAction and this year, we celebrate the incredible women leaders at Opportunity International. From CEOs and Directors to those spearheading our refugee initiatives, we are fortunate to have bold, intelligent, and empathetic women guiding our organisation.

Below, Nana shares her reflections on International Women's Day and how as an organisation we can #AccelerateAction for women in Africa:

What does International Women's Day mean to you? 

International Women's Day (IWD) is a day for celebrating our clients!

Most of our clients are women, and in many of the countries where we work there are structural challenges limiting women’s abilities to access the resources and responses they need to fulfil their potential.

IWD is a day to celebrate women navigating their way through those challenges; they are an inspiration to all.

How are we #accelerating action as an organisation to empower women in Africa?

At Opportunity International, our last and most ambitious value is Transformation.

Transforming perceptions of women on the continent of Africa, from a homogenous group labelled “higher risk” to a wonderful range of individuals capable of self-transformation, is the most important way in which we are accelerating action to empower women.

I am particularly inspired in this by a colleague and a friend who works in one of our partner banks in Ghana. With transformation as her executive mandate, and with a relentless passion to keep growing the opportunities for all youth especially young women, she is a powerful advocate and a wonderful role model for us all.

How does your role facilitate empowering women?

One of the needs that we address is better access to finance.

My role is to grow the resources invested in our Financial Services Partners (FSPs), so those partners can do more to support our clients with timely, affordable and appropriate access to finance.

To get a little more technical, it is facilitating Investing in FSPs for Impact, with

• the additionality of scaling FSP resources so that new client segments emerge from people who were not previously perceived as fully bankable (e.g. scaling market creating innovation in Refugee Financing)and
• the intentionality of specifically designing for those client needs, so clients do actually use the resources (addressing the previous non-consumption of conventional products which had not been appropriately designed for them)
  
  

Why is it so important to empower the women in our programmes?

I will take the example of our work on rural livelihoods, where women are engaged through Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs), and they then engage their husbands and families through Farming, Business and Entrepreneurship.

If our programmes don’t empower women in the VSLAs, women won’t share their success with their families, and families won’t have the opportunity to create shared visions that break cycles of intergenerational poverty – through empowerment, our women clients become equal bread winners and essential bridge builders in sustaining the change they want to see.  

And they do sustain that change!

They spread the word so that other women hear about our programmes and want to participate, and it is a wonderful challenge to us to keep up with demand and grow our programmes so we can help more women to transform their own lives.

That is something to celebrate. 

If you are inspired this and want to help us reach more women this International Women's Day, you can donate by clicking here.

Or if you'd like to hear more about the inspiring women we work with, you can sign up to our newsletter by clicking here.