How Rushika made it in a male-dominated tech space

Rushika Pattni is the co-founder and CEO of two start-ups focused on financial technology and human resources advisory, one of them being Recroot Africa.

As a globetrotter, Rushika traveled the world to get global exposure before coming back home from her scholarship at one of the most prestigious Ivy League universities in the US, Yale University.

She was the only selected student for the class of 2015, and the pressure and expectation to represent the whole nation was high where she did a dual degree in economics and history of science, medicine and public health.

Through her scholarship at Yale, she was able to travel to France, the UK, Nepal, China, and India. She worked in India, Mauritius, Rwanda, and Kenya, and when she returned to Tanzania, she got a job as Chief Strategy Officer at Selcom, becoming the company’s youngest C-Suite member.

She says her journey was not easy as she had to fight stereotypes as a young Tanzanian woman of Indian descent. She was in a male-dominated industry, and how she carried herself said a lot about the kind of person she was.

“My one mantra in life is to always show up prepared and at your best. If you’re confident in yourself, no one can bring you down. You are your best cheerleader, and the moment you keep your faith in yourself strong, it is just onward growth from there,” says Rushika.

She has played a significant role in promoting the startup ecosystem in Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania.

In Kenya and Rwanda, she was with the African Leadership Group (ALG), which launched its first university in Rwanda as part of its efforts to scale the first campus from Mauritius.

At ALG, she was placed in Rwanda, where she got to have her first teaching experience teaching one of the courses on the leadership core curriculum. After Rwanda, she joined the Kenyan team to help hire the first batch of facilitators for Kenya’s accelerator program.

“I learned how to work with teammates from different backgrounds, nationalities, and experiences, but we all came together to solve one problem while wearing many hats,” she says.

When she returned to Tanzania, Rushika was not part of a startup. She joined Selcom at a time when they had just signed a 7-year partnership with Mastercard as a fintech enabler in East Africa and SADC.

She joined as one of the youngest heads of departments. From merchant payments to card acquiring, she was exposed to thinking through how to launch payment products in their payments ecosystem—tasks she found to be complex but executed successfully.

“I created four departments under me during that time, and hired about 40-plus staff. It was similar to running an offshoot startup under an established payments firm,” she says.

Commenting on this year’s International Women’s Day, which is centered on “innovation for a gender-equal future,” Rushika says, “a gender-equal future is one where we hope that we have equal and equitable opportunities for women, with almost no unconscious bias.”

She says her work speaks for itself, and “the energy, dedication, and ethics that I put into everything I do are the backbone of my career journey.”

On the importance of startups in addressing basic gender issues, Rushika shares that startups can address such issues if they put their minds to it and are focused on women’s empowerment.

“The tech startup space is certainly one where there are always men at the top, and we always see male founders. My one goal this year is to be part of the group of women leaders in East Africa running their own profitable businesses and removing this stereotype,” says Rushika.

According to her, being a woman in the tech space hasn’t always been rosy. However, with global exposure, she’s mastered the skill of patient listening, which has been key to her success.

“I have learned that people don’t remember what you say, but how you make them feel. I always remind myself to be a kind leader first. You never know when a little help from 10 years ago can become your next investor in your present work. The world is a small place, and you have one life, so live it with the grandest of dreams and execute them with no fear,” she adds.

As a way of supporting women at the workplace to achieve their potential, Pattni says, “when hiring, I always ensure priority is given to more women at entry-level, mid-level, and senior-level roles.”

Commenting on what she thinks is the cause of the lack of diversity in top leadership in the corporate world, she says that if we want to change how women are rising to the top, we have to be mindful of the surrounding support system they have, whether at home or at work.

Adding to that, she says that if the support system is there around her, no force can stop a woman from achieving anything.

She ends by saying that not enough is being done to address issues of gender bias at work; “we have a long way to go.”