Africa women need mind set shift to address career challenges – Adepoju

Experts have urged women across the African continent to have a total mind set shift to address career and life challenges.

The experts who spoke at the Global Mentorship Conference organised by I-Train Africa said women need a mind shift as the first step in addressing life challenges.

“The first step we need to take to address the myriad of challenges faced by the average African woman requires a shift in mindset. It is just about mindset, that is what it has been and people don’t want to change it,” Aderinsola Adio-Adepoju, convener and founder of I-Train Africa said.

She noted the organization is working hard to address the problem of under representation of women in leadership positions.

“In the years past, we used to just fight that women are not being educated but today, women are being educated. However, we’ve also discovered that even with education, women would finish from higher institution and instead building their careers to get to the global stage, they stay in their comfort zone,” she said.

According to her there are several of them, and cultural bias tops the list. “We are looking at how we can address these challenges using the case study of successful career women, who are doing well in their careers.

“We cannot keep whining, we need to figure out how those women, who have done it are doing it and that is why we put together this conference. We had about 41 speakers among them are successful career women those in entrepreneurship to share their journey with participants.”

“Two thousand of the most engaged women at this particular conference will be allowed to participate in a free leadership programme for 13 weeks. This is to further equip them for the leadership positions.”

She explained that the Global Mentorship Conference is a mentorship conference for African youths, women and professionals who hope to gain clarity and direction, build and belong to global networks and advance to the top of their careers globally.

According to her, the conference was planned to examine the challenges that women encounter in their journey to get to the top of their careers.

She added that apart from addressing the four major career paths of entrepreneurship, academia, freelancing (gig economy) and regular nine to five occupation, the event afforded the participants to join the panel session where panelists shared their career journey with 25,000 participants across 40 African countries.