Adeyemi Adebisi was recently announced as the Chairman, the Board of Trustees, Women in Management, Business and Public Service (WimBiz) during its 21st Annual Conference, a two-day conference with a focus on the theme, “Firing Forward: the future in focus.”
Adebisi, the Chief Executive Officer, of DCSL Corporate Services Limited, was named chairman of the board of 11 women and two men.
In this interview, she provides insight into how she intends to lead WimBiz to the next level…. Excerpts
What does the new leadership plan to achieve?
The first thing is to consolidate what has been done in the past because there is no point saying that you want to do better than they have done if you can’t even consolidate. A lot of things have been institutionalized so it is to ensure that those things continued to be in place and also ensure that it even does better as we continue to partner with like-minded organizations to take Wimbiz outside of Nigeria. The intention is to take it global.
How would you rate the 2022 Wimbiz?
I would say it was exceptional considering the fact that It is a transition year – a year the founders decided that they want to transition to a board.
The interim council we used to know was dissolved and the secretariat was enhanced, so really, we tried to reduce the governance from the perspective of layers. We removed one layer and ensure that the headquarters was able to function without too much interference.
It is one of the years that I would imagine that all of the programs were consolidated. We didn’t have as frequent programs but they were more impactful programs.
What’s your assessment of women in politics?
The numbers are not good but we keep pushing.
In terms of the number we have, there aren’t still enough women’s advocacy to encourage more women to step out to register and then support women candidates.
It is important that you support a woman running for any post as this will ensure they grow and then seeing them there would encourage other women to grow as well.
What are you doing to encourage women’s emancipation in order to support the economy?
We have a lot of programs for that whereby we have different entrepreneurs in different sectors come to aid. The problem has been accessing funding, visibility, and being able to have sponsors.
So Wimbiz is trying to enhance capital, we have a program – WimCap – where we train women, not just in terms of providing them with access to funding but also improving their capacity. Some of them don’t know how to keep their books properly, some of them don’t know how to go about the right structures and some of them need help with putting out the governance structure. That’s why we are also working with different sponsors. One of the events was sponsored by All on for the women in energy who are doing great things in solar and renewable energy.
How do you follow up with these women?
We have a system in place that helps to measure and monitor. With regards to a lot of the things that the women we empower are doing, we measure and we monitor and that’s how we are able to report in terms of the numbers and impact.
Even for those that have access to capital or training, we don’t just leave them. periodically, we go back and check how well they are doing because we need to be able to also measure how much of an impact we have had by following up on them on a periodic basis.
Where do you see WimBiz in the next five years?
The plan is to go global. I think by now we have conquered Nigeria. I don’t think there is anywhere you mention WimBiz and then people would say what’s that?
We have been able to impact lives beyond the African continent. there are lots of women that need to be empowered and inspired all over the world. In the next five years, I am sure that would have happened.