Sylvia Wairimu Mulinge, who has now taken over as the new CEO of MTN Uganda, is one of the key beneficiaries of a programme initiated by Bob Collymore to mainstream women in leadership at Safaricom, Kenya’s biggest company.

By the time Collymore died, Safaricom had 2,252 permanent female employees, according to the company’s Sustainable Business Report for 2019, which was aptly titled Towards Reducing Inequality, and which was the last that Collymore signed off as CEO before his demise on July 1 of that year.

This number represented a 1:1 gender ratio, making Safaricom one of the few blue-chip Kenyan companies to have an equal representation of men to women in its workforce at the time. But, significant as this was as a milestone in corporate Kenya, the ratio told only part of the story.

As happened with the nominee for who

The unanimous rejection by the National Assembly Committee on Appointments of Tourism Cabinet nominee Secretary Penina Malonza demonstrated the challenges faced by women face in climbing the leadership ladder.

Although MPs later overturned the decision and approved the nomination of Malonza alongside 23 other Cabinet nominees, the initial rejection proved how it is difficult enough for women to get high quality jobs in which they are competing directly with men who are equally qualified.

Corporate leader

This is even harder in technical and science-based jobs such as engineering, which are, by default, at the heart of Safaricom operations. As a corporate leader that others looked up to set trends and push boundaries, Collymore was alive first, to the need for companies to evaluate themselves on how they performed on various self-imposed parameters that drive growth and customer engagement, and second, on the need to empower women through both employment and entrepreneurship.

Sylvia, who took over as MTN Uganda Chief Executive Officer on October 1, was one of the women who benefited from Collymore’s vision and stewardship, which was in part based on a commitment to increase the ratio of women in the telco’s senior leadership as well as in its technology department.

For instance, the year that Collymore died, Safaricom had 23 per cent of its female workforce in its technology division. Although this rose to 24 per cent the following year, it has since slipped to 22 per cent, according to the latest Safaricom data.

To the company’s credit, however, it trained 50 women under its Women in Leadership Programme in the 2021-2022 financial year, which ended in March.

That means there is a pipeline that is producing women leaders who have the opportunity to either grow within the organisation or, like Sylvia, transition further afield.

Indeed, she stands out as the face of the company’s continuing journey of ensuring women ascend to leadership positions considering that until her appointment as MTN Uganda CEO she was Safaricom’s Chief Consumer Business Officer, a position she held since 2018.

The expanse of Collymore’s vision in the corporate firmament was evident when he became the first CEO to put Safaricom on the path of publishing annual sustainability reports.

He did this even when he and his team were aware that this would, in some instances, shine a spotlight on the company’s underbelly, such as its vulnerability to fraud by staff.

Financial year

Tellingly, in the financial year that ended in March, the company fired 24 employees over fraud, a number captured in its latest report launched last week.

Launching such sustainability reports spotlighted other issues that Safaricom needed to address, such as the need to expand opportunities across gender, disability and other considerations for inclusivity and diversity.

As a business leader, Collymore believed that there were three things that drive business success; purpose, people and profit. He was keen that these be understood in that particular order.

“The first thing is purpose,” he said. “You have to have (a positive) purpose, even as an individual. If you want to deliver that purpose, you have to make sure that you are taking care of your people.”

If the first two were properly aligned, profits would follow, and Collymore was keen about profit as he was about purpose and people, and this triumvirate still informs Safaricom’s corporate vision and mission to date.

Among the people he deliberately set out to mainstream were women employees. In 2019, Safaricom had 2,252 women employees, one more than their male counterparts.

Three years since his demise, the number has declined to 2,128 while male employees have increased to 2,283, according to the company’s sustainability report for 2022, which rates gender parity at 50:50.

Of course, it can be argued that Sylvia is among the 124 women who have left the telco in the intervening period, which could be an indication that some of those who left did so for greener pastures.

Empower women

Besides looking inwardly to empower women, over the many years that Collymore had interacted with Safaricom’s numerous suppliers, it dawned on him – and there was data to back this – that the companies that Safaricom engaged in business with, and which were led by women, cared more about their staff compared to those led by men.

Interestingly, they were also less likely to be caught up in gross malpractices as a general rule. Over time, and as the chair of Safaricom’s tender board, Collymore started making deliberate decisions to work with more businesses driven by women because, in his view, they also had higher integrity scores. Sylvia was among the senior managers specifically tasked to ensure that this happened deliberately.

Another problem arose. When Safaricom’s management team looked at the telco’s financials, they realised that women-led businesses accounted for less than three per cent of Safaricom’s annual spending. Again, according to sources, Sylvia was tasked with the responsibility of reviewing how this could be increased over time.

“The big problem was that women businesses tend to provide table clothes and flowers. That does not really generate much income,” Collymore said in an interview with this writer just weeks before he died of cancer on July 1, 2019. “What we said was: ‘We need more women in technology’”.

So, the company started encouraging women business leaders to go into technology, laying fibre, maintaining sites and offering other technical services and Safaricom put in place mentorship programmes for its women suppliers with a view to encouraging them to move away from traditional occupations like catering and events services. Sylvia was, once again, at the centre of co-ordinating the programme.

Internally, the management also started encouraging its women employees to take up technology-based jobs. Where necessary, it trained them or paired them with contractors so they could come in as sub-contractors. As a result, the number of women in Safaricom’s technology division rose from 123 in 2016 to 180 by 2019.

It is not surprising that soon after Sylvia, a key cog in this programme, took up her posting in Uganda, she visited the Kimaka Health Centre III, one of the health institutions that support maternal and child healthcare in Jinja City, continuing on a trajectory of empowering women by supporting programmes for social and economic transformation.

To empower women in the long run while at Safaricom, it was necessary to create a large pool that both the telco and other technology companies could tap from.

That was how the idea of Safaricom’s Women in Technology Programme was born, first, to encourage girls to take up science and technology-based courses in school and, later, setting up structures that encouraged women in entrepreneurship to network with a view to challenging them to take up technology-based contracts.

“Eventually, we want to move them away from being sub-contractors and become direct contractors,” Collymore told this writer.

By the time of his death, the company had contracted 178 women-owned businesses which accounted for 3.2 per cent of the company’s total spend, highlighting both the opportunities the firm had created and the potential for growth of such businesses if they stepped up to the plate. 

As a critical member of the tender board, Sylvia was, according to sources, at the nerve centre of identifying and monitoring the women-led businesses that Safaricom contracted.

Drive diversity

However, the late CEO did not just look outside Safaricom to drive diversity and inclusion, especially the inclusion of women. At the time of his death, Sylvia was the second senior most employee at Safaricom, holding the position of director of the consumer business unit. Indeed, she was also among the top contenders in Collymore’s succession battle, finishing as the third best candidate according to one of the people who was privy to the selection process.

“Sylvia is a purpose-led and impact-driven business leader. She lived the Safaricom purpose of transforming lives of our customers using technology as an enabler of positive change,” Peter Ndegwa, the man who succeeded Collymore as CEO, said in a press statement announcing her departure to MTN Uganda, majority owned by South Africa’s MTN Group.

Incidentally, in 2018, Sylvia had been appointed to lead Vodacom Tanzania, a subsidiary of South Africa’s Vodacom Group and Tanzania’s leading telco.

However, she ended up not taking up the assignment after Tanzanian authorities declined to give her a work permit during the tenure of the then President John Pombe Magufuli. Today, however, she is now at the helm of the biggest telco in Uganda.