Women’s organisation moves boldly into the future:
For ten years, Naadiya Moosajee and Hema Vallabh have faithfully managed WomEng, an organisation they had co-founded as students to cultivate the next generation of women engineers. WomEng has now sired WomHub, allowing the founders to extend their services and programmes to women in other professions.
The longevity of WomEng is a credit to the tenacity and ingenuity of its founders.
Naadiya Moosajee had established the organisation, then named South African Women in Engineering (SAWomEng), as part of group of engineering students at the University of Cape Town in 2006. It was relaunched in 2013 as WomEng, with Hema Vallabh as co-founder.
Its objectives remained the same throughout: to develop and increase the number of women engineers in Africa.
The organisation did so with aplomb and invention. The founders had recruited plenty of enthusiastic members, especially once they’d started GirlEng in 2010, the programme targeting school learners considering careers in engineering. (The first girls mentored on GirlEng graduated in 2014.) They pulled in big-name sponsors. They developed a comprehensive suite of programmes for women in all stages of their careers. And on request from longstanding sponsors Unilever, they grew beyond the national borders, offering their first workshops in Kenya in 2013.
International acclaim followed. Moosajee has, for instance, been a repeat delegate at the World Economic Forum as one of the organisation’s ‘Global Shapers’. (She has selfies with Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg at this year’s Davos meeting to prove it.)
Then WomEng ran into difficulties. In the wake of the global economic troubles and as oil and mineral prices dropped, their sponsors – many in the engineering and mining areas – had to tighten their belts. Suddenly WomEng’s future looked less secure.
At the same time, new opportunities were beckoning. Surgeons were suggesting that similar programmes were needed in their discipline, where sexual discrimination, research says, is still rife. Women in the finance sector also showed interest.
“We started to realise that the programmes we were running for women in engineering were completely transferrable,” says Moosajee, 32. “Across disciplines, women face the same challenges – in skills development, capacity issues, access to networking and communities.”
And so in 2015 was born WomHub. The founding of the company signals more than just a cosmetic name change. Instead, it is a tech start-up that will develop and host various online and offline gender-parity programmes, including those of WomEng.
WomHub will address three concerns. HubEd will look at skills development and online gaming for education. HubNet will create networking and mentoring platforms. And HubLance will identify career opportunities and provide an e-lancing platform for women. (E-lancing is broadly defined as freelance work sourced through online platforms.)
“We will, in effect, become a mega consultant across all sectors,” explains Moosajee.
One particular focus, explains Moosajee, will be on the ‘missing middle’: women who are frustrated by obstructive work environments and limited opportunities in their fields, and choose, instead, to make dramatic career changes. (Moosajee, for example, has just started a Turkish restaurant with her husband.)
She describes WomHub as “a start-up with 10 years of experience”. It also brings 10 years of partnerships to the boardroom. UNESCO, for instance, will host WomHub’s #1millionGirlsInSTEM campaign official launch in 2016.
In the meantime, Moosajee is plotting WomHub’s growth with the support of Telkom FutureMakers’ Accelerator programme at the Bandwidth Barn. FutureMakers is a Telkom initiative to drive innovation in South Africa’s ICT sector and the Accelerator programme supports existing black-owned ICT businesses, helping overcome barriers to growth WomHub has offices in the Bandwidth Barn in Woodstock, which is a FutureMakers Hub, and is also receiving financial support from FutureMakers to get their leadership and new venture creation courses accredited.
Plans for WomHub include forays into Nigeria, Rwanda, and even the Gaza Strip. And in 2016 the business will launch its ambitious #1MillionGirlsInSTEM programme, with the aim of mentoring one million girls to enter the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines over the next decade.
It has always been a maxim of WomEng to “run like a business, but think like an NGO”, says Moosajee. But some operational adjustments will be required, she understands. The days of volunteers and shoestring programming may have to become features of its past.
“We need to be very strategic about how we plan for the next 10 years,” she says, “how to make sure we have proper funding sources, and to make sure we stay relevant.”
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