Unlocking The Entrepreneurial Ambition Of Women
Video Description
Female entrepreneurship is an “economic promise” capturing attention of governments, corporations, and civil society all over the world, since small- and medium-sized enterprises are engines of economic growth and stability. Currently, women are creating businesses at a greater rate than men in Ghana, Nigeria, and Thailand. Despite proven benefits of women’s economic engagement, female entrepreneurs face disproportionate barriers in growing their businesses: difficulty accessing credit, markets, and equal protection under the law. Join optimistic female entrepreneurs and those that are helping women around the world overcome financing and legal barriers.
Featuring:
Moderator – Melanne Verveer – Executive Director for Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security
Comfort Aku Adjahoe – CEO of Ele Agbe Co. Ltd
Rosemary Amondi – CEO and Founder of TraceSoft
Catherine Gill – SVP, Investor Relations and Operations for Root Capital
and Hirut Girma – Attorney and Land Tenure / Gender Specialist for Landesa
Speakers
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Attorney & Land Tenure/Gender Specialist,
LandesaHirut Girma is a lawyer and development practitioner with significant international experience. She has considerable experience working with multilateral, bilateral, and national institutions. As a Land Tenure and Gender Specialist at Landesa, she provides analytical and implementation expertise on rural land tenure, women’s land rights, land rights formalization, land administration, land management, and land dispute resolution. Previous to Landesa, Ms. Girma served as an advisor at the Executive Office of UNESCO (Paris) and worked as a Programme Specialist at UNESCO’s Cluster Office for Ethiopia, Djibouti, and the African Union. Her geographic experience includes Ethiopia, Djibouti, France, India, Mozambique, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania, and the United States. Ms. Girma holds a Juris Doctor of Law and a post graduate LL.M in Sustainable International Development.
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Catherine manages investor relations, communications and marketing at Root Capital, an agricultural lender that provides loans and advisory services to small and growing agricultural businesses in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Indonesia. Since its founding in 1999, Root Capital has disbursed nearly $1BN in capital to more than 500 enterprises that represent over 2M farmers.
In her role at Root Capital, Catherine oversees all debt and philanthropy fundraising, including management of $125M in assets from over 200 individual, corporate, foundation and government impact investors. In 2012, Catherine played a leadership role in launching Root Capital’s Women in Agriculture Initiative, which aims to strengthen and grow gender-inclusive businesses that provide reliable economic opportunities for women in agricultural value chains.
Prior to joining Root Capital, Catherine spent ten years in the Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) industry, at both the Nonprofit Finance Fund and the Structured Employment Economic Development Corporation (SEEDCO), working as a loan officer and financial management consultant for community development projects across New England.
She has served as an adjunct professor at Boston University’s School of Management and lectures widely on impact investing and social enterprise development. Catherine holds a bilingual M.B.A from the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de la Empresa (IESE) in Barcelona and a B.A. in ancient Greek from Wellesley College. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts with her husband, son, daughter, and two lop-eared rabbits.
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CEO and Founder, TraceSoft
Rosemary is the Founder and CEO of TraceSoft Limited, a supply chain information management and analytics firm based in Nairobi Kenya. Formerly General Manager of GS1 Kenya, the global Bar-coding standards organization, Rosemary has over 12 years of experience in business technology and supply chain process improvement. She has worked on numerous projects in East Africa on traceability and sustainable sourcing initiatives, advising governments, multinationals and producers.
Rosemary is a supply chain professional and Alumni of the Strathmore Business School. In 2013 she was awarded TechWomen Emerging Leader by the US Department of State, through which she represented her country in a mentorship exchange program in the Silicon Valley, California.
Passionate about the potential to increase sustainable trade with Africa, her ambition is to make markets work for Africa by leveraging information technology to enhance efficiency and transparency in the supply chain.
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Chief Executive Officer, Ele Agbe Co. Ltd
Comfort Aku Adjahoe-Jennings
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ele Agbe Company Ltd, a Shea butter and local beads jewellery production and export company in Ghana. Ele Agbe produces a variety of body creams, soaps, lotion bars, body oils and lip balms from Shea butter that are exported to the US and Japanese markets. Mrs Adjahoe-Jennings has run Ele Agbe for 18 years. During this time she has participated in several trade shows in the US and Japan. She has also organised rural Ghanaian women into cooperatives to enable them to produce and supply products to her company.
Mrs Adjahoe-Jennings has transformed Ele Agbe into a highly quality Shea cosmetics export company that still works with a network of women Shea nut pickers and processors.
Mrs Adjahoe-Jennings is the founder of the Network of African Women Entrepreneurs NGO and the President of AWEP, Ghana Chapter.
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Executive Director, Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security
Ambassador Melanne Verveer is the executive director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security. She most recently served as the first US Ambassador for Global Women’s Issues. In this position, she coordinated foreign policy issues and activities relating to the political, economic and social advancement of women, traveling to nearly sixty countries. She worked to ensure that women’s participation and rights are fully integrated into US foreign policy, and she played a leadership role in the Administration’s development of the US National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security. From 2000-2008, she was the Chair and Co-CEO of Vital Voices Global Partnership, an international NGO that she co-founded to invest in emerging women leaders. During the Clinton administration, she served as Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to the First Lady. She received a B.S. and M.S. from Georgetown University.
