Yielding Accomplished African Women Speaker

Last week, I was a speaker at the Yielding Accomplished African Women (Yaa W) Program. It is a summer program for Ghanaian female university students, including some of my own students from Ashesi University – that serves as a Finance and Technology Accelerator!

The program is the brainchild of Diana Wilson (in the first photo with me below), a graduate of University of Virginia, who has a truly interdisciplinary or even liberal arts background of studying Sociology, Women lib studies and Finance. In her commerce internships she saw a gap of assertive black women and decided to do something about it. During her senior year of college she has enlisted colleagues to help her out and this summer it happened. Read Diana’s statement about the leadership program she created named after Yaa Asantewaa here. What if more people were like Diana? What a wonderful world it would be…

I have been thinking a lot about the talks I do outside of work and how to make sure they are impactful and also rewarding for me. I think maybe I will insist in the future on longer sessions such as the 3 hour session I did with Yaa W and smaller groups. I very much enjoyed talking to the young women in the program about wellness-work-love-fun-development balance (borrowed heavily from OneStep’s Success audit), love-bombing over criticising, and elevator pitches / first impressions.

I was happy to be able to assist in a mission I believe in and felt after a halfday of leadership discussions I had made 10 new friends!

What talks do you happily give outside of work?

With Diana and her team.

In the conference room with the students.

In the sun after our session!