I’m very conscious of the fact that you can’t do it alone. It’s team work. When you do it alone you run the risk that when you are no longer there nobody else will do it.
Africa Environmentalism and conservation is suffering from a profound imbalance in our current leadership. While we strive to protect the diversity of our environment, we have overlooked the importance of diversity in our teams. Diverse teams are more productive, collaborative, resilient and innovative, yet women are routinely underrepresented in decision-making roles. With the joint crises of biodiversity loss and climate change, we are at a moment when courageous, authentic leadership is needed more than ever.
WE Africa was created to remedy this imbalance by empowering women leaders in African conservation to transform their own and others’ leadership, creating strong mixed gender teams that will achieve greater environmental outcomes.
WE Africa is designed to scale into a contagious movement for women’s environmental leadership benefitting people, wildlife, and ecosystems across the continent and then around the world.
Part of my plea, as a person who has come from philanthropy for many years is trust the women of Africa, invest big in them, think big of them as they think big and they want to do good work. The deeper your investment in people the more you will see impact.
Our Vision & Path to Impact
WE Africa has sparked a movement of women leaders in Africa and beyond, who are role modelling a more inclusive and impactful way to do conservation. By delivering transformational and deeply African leadership experiences, amplified by a strong pay it forward approach and supported by a connected community; WE Africa is making tangible contributions to the sustainability and wellbeing of leaders and ecosystems. WE Africa is a beacon of hope for the future, locally and globally.
WE lead is the year long leadership experience for a cohort of 20 women environmental leaders in Africa each year. It includes tailored trainings, facilitated dialogues, one-on-one coaching and mentoring, community building, peer support, and increased visibility focused around the 5 pillars of personal leadership, wellbeing, relationship and collaboration, visibility for impact and radical imagination.
WE talk binds us to women leaders of diverse backgrounds, ages, countries, and across triumphs and challenges through authentic storytelling and shared experience.
WE move is the way we pay it forward and create the movement for change through a connected community. It connects WE Africa fellows to each other across cohorts and to the broader community, it scales our impact through an accelerator fund and inspires a community of practise across shared values both within the environmental space and beyond.
This is WE Africa – a connected community transformed for impact with one purpose.
