Experienced banker who found new career passion

Dar es Salaam. After vast experience in the banking industry, Mwanahiba Mzee has fallen in love with errand services.

One of Tanzania’s influential women, Ms Mzee, who is the managing director of Errands Services Company Limited, is targeting to improve quality of life by offering to collect and deliver personal and corporate errands of all kinds so that people, especially women, can concentrate on their main duties at work and families.

Before her current position, she was the managing director of Ecobank Tanzania. Her records show that she broke many institutional barriers to become the first female managing director and the first Tanzanian in Ecobank’s 39-country regional network.

She went ahead with breaking records when she became the first Tanzanian woman to head strategic regional projects across 18 countries in the Central, Eastern, and Southern African regions at the bank in 2020.

Her professional journey started with her willingness to take on additional work. This helped her gain more experience and knowledge in her career. The areas she was able to gain more experience in include operational risk management, retail products, and retail liabilities.

“This made trust to my former boss at Standard Chartered Bank who would leave me in charge of the department when he was traveling. This made me realise that I was ready for more responsibilities,” Ms Mzee says in an interview.

“When I was approached to lead reorganisation at Bank of Africa in 2012, I said yes,” she says.

At the Bank of Africa, she found herself handling sensitive projects and representing the managing director on various boards, committees, and in meetings.

“I applied for very few jobs. Most of the time, I was handpicked to participate in interviews. This was because of the knowledge, skills, and integrity I have cultivated over the years. I am a no-nonsense person, and I produce results,” says Ms Mzee.

Commenting on the obstacles she went through when growing her career, she says she missed some opportunities due to favoritism and corporate policies.

In 1997, with only four months in her first job, she became pregnant with her first child, and the bank she worked for did not provide maternity leave unless an employee had completed a six-month probationary period.

This was disappointing to her, but she could do nothing about it, so she had to quit. Soon after she gave birth and was ready for another job, she promised herself to meet her professional goals and joined Stanbic Bank Tanzania as a credit analyst.

According to her, she worked hard and made sure she met the targets, and it worked well for her. She then became the youngest senior corporate manager at the head office.

In 2004, she got another job at Standard Chartered as a general manager for small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) banking. She then went on to head a mortgage project, unsecured lending, and then operational risk and retail liabilities for East Africa.

She moved to the Bank of Africa at the executive level, where she led retail banking and, later, risk and compliance. Ms Mzee moved to Azania Bank for two years, leading strategy and business development, and later she was hired by Ecobank Tanzania as its managing director in 2017.

She said that though her career grew rapidly, her rise was not smooth, and she mentioned patriarchal attitudes and accusations that the promotion was due to having relationships with her male supervisors.

This went the extra mile, as she was also being harassed and bullied by her female colleagues each time she stood up for the young woman. But still, she never gave up, and she coached her female colleagues on how to deal with intimidating attitudes at the workplace.

Commenting on the sexual harassment at the workplace, she says it affects productivity and calls for the sexual harassment policies to be more effective than just policies.

“Sexual harassment policies must be more than just policies; they must also be implemented in practice and internalized by both men and women. This can be done by encouraging conversations in the workplace about gender discrimination and sexual harassment,” says Ms Mzee.

She says that for women to climb up the ladder, it is important for them to dream big, as women often do not aspire to the C-suite because of their family responsibilities. This reminds her of many times when she was the only woman interviewed for a leadership position.

She is keen on paving the way for women by inspiring them to take up leadership roles. Lack of more qualified mentors for young women who are entering the finance sector is another factor that does attract more women to the sector.

The good thing is, she reaches out to women to coach and prepare them for leadership. In her role as Managing Director at Ecobank, she advocated for change in the financial sector’s policies for women in management.

She is in the process of registering her consulting business, which is expected to offer services in business management and financial literacy.

She is also a non-executive director of Tambaza Secondary School since 2017, and she is a founding member and treasurer of an all women group known as Makhallat Wapenzi Group since 2005.