By Chilungamo Missi
Blantyre, November 22: Human Resource Director for Illovo Sugar Malawi, Khumbo Mtambo Banda has emphasised on the need to intensify mentorship and sponsorship programmes for women to ascend into leadership positions if the company is to achieve 30 percent representation of women leaders by 2026.
Banda said this Tuesday at Protea Ryalls Hotel in Blantyre during the Illovo Women in Leadership (IWIL) forum that was aimed at driving progress toward equality in leadership roles.
She said Illovo Malawi launched IWIL as a special forum in October 2022 to assist progress towards female equality in leadership roles within its operations in a bid to achieve high representation of women leaders.
Banda said: “IWIL aims at driving women in leadership positions within our business focusing on understanding how best we can influence women to develop in the business, how they are brought into the business through recruitment and how we can help and mentor them into managerial positions with the aim of achieving at least 30 percent representation of women leaders by 2026.”
Country Director for Bayer Malawi, who was guest of honour to the event, Chikondi Ng’ombe challenged women to strive to achieve leadership goals in organisations saying women have potential in such positions.
She, therefore, urged women to be bold and trust themselves saying they bring diversity such that companies that embrace diversity perform better than those that ignore it.
“You need to focus on delivering in spite of the environment you are in. You should have high learning ability because things are changing every day and for you to continue delivering you need to learn new ways of doing things.” Ng’ombe said.
She encouraged other institutions to emulate Illovo Sugar in making deliberate efforts to include women by introducing programmes such as IWIL.
Delegates asked a series of questions to Ngo’mbe as to how she has fared in her career as Bayer Malawi Country Director.
This provided an opportunity for the women to be inspired by a fellow lady that has made significant impact in the corporate world.
