Research has shown that women constitute about one-half of Nigeria’s total population of 158 million. However, a good number of them find it difficult to get to the top due to various challenges.  Mrs. Amina Oyagbola (nee Attah, ) has discovered the growing need to assist some of these women and give them the right focus in life. To achieve this, she founded Women In Successful Career- WISCAR which has been a ladder to the success of young women. In this interview, Mrs.Oyagbola speaks on the ideals of the organization.
Excerpts:

By Josephine Igbinovia

My idea about WISCAR was borne out of a passion to provide  answers to the yearnings of young women, especially in Africa, who are faced with a lot of challenges in life which hinder their goals in life.

Many supposed career women end up as failures simply because of the challenges they pass through which could have been avoided if they were well mentored. In my day to day activities, my personal experience as a professional, wife and mother, reveal that many young women do not excel due to lack of mentoring.  For instance, they might need a change of job or, the acquisition of  higher qualifications, but are unaware of this.

In a nut shell, WISCAR arose out of the growing realization of a deep societal need when it was apparent that professional women in Africa generally, and Nigeria in particular, have an urgent need for access to strategic guidance and support during their professional and corporate careers.

During my interaction with numerous young women at various stages of their professional careers, I was confronted with the constant barrage of questions and enquiries from them.

The numerous questions I and other corporate women in “senior positions” received from younger colleagues all over the country, who we have tried to help along the way in an adhoc fashion, convinced me of the need for the WISCAR initiative.

It became clear that most young professional women in Africa do not have access to proper guidance or support at critical points in their professional careers, which would  enable them to understand the corporate terrain, avoid identifiable pitfalls, and navigate their careers successfully.

Without any guidance and support, they become confused, begin to feel isolated and suffer a loss of confidence in their ability to meet those challenges successfully.

This either causes them to give up completely or just struggle along sub-optimally in relation to their true ability and potential. Access to strategic advice at those difficult moments could make a difference in maximizing their unrealized potential and helping them reach the top positions or meet their aspirations based on merit.

There is also a wider angle to the problem.

In a developing country like Nigeria, the larger society itself is struggling to cope with enormous socio-economic challenges, which affect women more severely and reduce their ability to enjoy equal opportunities for advancement.

These include low levels of primary school enrollment, low levels of economic empowerment and low levels of political representation. These factors exacerbate the gender problem and underscore the need for practical and effective solutions to be found.

Against such a background, it was clear that providing strategic career advice and support to women in Nigeria would be a way of contributing to national development.

This is because at the macro-economic level, such a programme would help the nation tap into a neglected and underutilized human resource endowment. This would be expected to have a commensurate positive impact on national development and GDP growth since women constitute about one-half of Nigeria’s total population of 158 million!

In this vein, by helping to unleash the largely untapped potential of women, WISCAR would be supporting existing efforts by the Nigerian Government under the NEEDS programme, vision 2020 and multilateral initiatives such as NEPAD towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

At the individual level, it would contribute to giving women equal opportunity to excel in the corporate world thus leading to higher productivity for the benefit of all.

The difficult question however, was how to fill the gap in a systematic and practical way. It is in trying to answer the question that the idea of setting up WISCAR emerged.

After much thought and consultation, I concluded that I could play my own part by establishing a mentoring network offering strategic guidance and support to young women. However, in order to make an impact, it would have to be a mentoring network with a difference! It would have to combine personal and cultural sensitivity with international expertise. It would also create a strategic mentoring platform to meet the highest international standards in terms of service delivery, best practice and the use of technology while remaining responsive to the individual needs of the young women and the socio-cultural context within which they live.

It will also be a mentoring framework with a methodology that will strive to address the practical challenges women face or have difficulty with in the work place, such as power and politics, self-promotion, networking communication, negotiation skills, and emotional intelligence.

The vision thus emerged of WISCAR as a network that would establish such a mentoring platform for women careers using the best technology and staff to deliver its services. It involves one-on-one interactions in structured framework between the mentees and experienced mentors to whom they would have unique access for advice and to help resolve career difficulties for a period of 12 months. One of the main motivations for such an approach is that, if successful, it could be replicated nationwide and even across Africa.

It should also help a significantly higher number of women reach the top of their chosen professions, and contribute to nation development.

Many of our mentees have already changed jobs, got promotion by virtue of the mentoring they have received, many have furthered their education, applied for scholarship, etc.’