Growing up in a poor family in rural Kenya, Jennifer witnessed firsthand the societal mistreatment of girls: “I watched my mom and different ladies within the village function as donkeys. They’d stick with it their backs firewood, bananas, a bag of different stuff and a child. I noticed them get abused, crushed and work 24 hours a day,” she mentioned in an interview. Training was her escape. She did properly sufficient to be positioned on the prestigious Treasured Blood Excessive Faculty in Nairobi as a teen and has by no means seemed again. As an alternative, she has reached out a hand to assist ladies and women who had been similar to her as soon as.
After Jennifer graduated from College of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, she pursued further research within the UK on the College of Leeds. Then Jennifer returned to Kenya to finish her PhD at Kenyatta College. Her thesis matter—ladies, schooling and improvement—will be seen as a peek into her future, however earlier than she grew to become an advocate for girls’s financial empowerment, Jennifer taught on the college for ten years. It was solely after a stint within the United Nations that she took a full step into the world that now holds her in such excessive esteem.
In 1991, Kenya Ladies Finance Belief (KWFT), the precursor to as we speak’s Kenya Ladies Microfinance Financial institution (KWMB), a subsidiary of Kenya Ladies Holding, was in a troubled state. Based in 1981 below the auspices of Mary Okelo, the primary African girl supervisor at Barclays Financial institution in Kenya, KWFT was set as much as deal with the monetary wants of girls as a lady serving, girl led financial institution. Ten years on nevertheless, KWFT was bleeding cash on the price of $300,000 a 12 months. Regardless of her lack of expertise within the monetary trade, Jennifer bravely took the helm and sought schooling, assist and recommendation from these round her. In an interview with Monetary InstancesJennifer confided: “I used to be the mortgage officer; I used to be the accountant; I used to be the auditor; I used to be every little thing. However I knew what poverty means; I knew what starvation means; I knew these ladies.” This fearless dive into the unknown paid off. A few years later, KWFT emerged as a mannequin microfinance establishment, one that’s dead-on in reaching its mission, offering 900,000 ladies with monetary merchandise equivalent to loans, financial savings and insurance coverage.
Particularly in occasions of disaster, management will be the deciding consider whether or not an organization, or a trigger, can survive. However opposite to the imaginative and prescient of a frontrunner as a single particular person rallying followers from on excessive, Jennifer’s concept is that this: “I wish to work with folks as a result of I imagine that I can’t do it alone.” Jennifer additionally believes that “Folks mustn’t turn out to be leaders to allow them to be worshipped by the folks, however in order that they’ll actually serve the folks with dedication and with sincerity.”
With regards to her place as chief in an trade dominated by males, Jennifer’s place is evident: “I’m large into ladies’s management. Now we have bought to have leaders to run these establishments and we’d like ladies to run them.” Nonetheless, she admits that even at KWFT, ladies typically drop out of the race for management on the center administration stage. She worries that ladies don’t need management positions as a result of they’ve so many different priorities, notably of their mid to late 30s when many are married with their first kids. “We’re very aware of this and we attempt to push them up the ladder, however it’s not at all times attainable.”
“…the lady is the core. She holds us up. It’s important to assist ladies, if we need to make a distinction.”
In response to this, KWMB conducts management coaching to determine and develop ladies leaders. Actually, KWMB (then referred to as KWFT) received the primary Ladies’s World Banking Excellence in Management Award launched in 2011. The award acknowledges the “role-model” establishment within the community that exemplifies each excellence in ladies management and excellence in efficiency. Nonetheless, coaching is only one piece of the puzzle; mentorship is the opposite. “Ladies have to see that it may be finished,” she mentioned. “My definition of mentors is individuals who will get ladies to maneuver to the subsequent stage. It’s not those who say ‘be good and be good,’ no. No matter it takes to maneuver you to the subsequent stage, take it.” She additionally believes that mentorship, like every good marketing strategy, needs to be structured and finished in ranges. “Mentorship is a gradual course of,” she admits, even perhaps slower for girls being mentored into management roles as a result of they are going to be breaking the obstacles of tradition and the ladders of custom on the similar time.
Nonetheless, the trail to ladies’s management is evident for Jennifer: With mentorship, assist, publicity and visibility “we can have sturdy ladies leaders,” she says.
With a lot achieved, what has stored the indefatigable Jennifer Riria going? Easy. It’s the perception that “the lady is the core. She holds us up. It’s important to assist ladies, if we need to make a distinction.”
Additional Studying:
Interview with CNBC Africa “Ladies on Wealth” Nov 26, 2014
Inspirational success story for entrepreneurs: a biography of Jennifer Riria by Maramentor
Small loans, large ambition an interview with the Monetary Instances Jun 6 2014
Why Microfinance and Ladies? A speech at Ladies’s World Banking
