Rhobi: Traditions should not stop women from advancing

Dar es Salaam. She grew up in the Kuria community, where schooling for girls was secondary to undergoing Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

FGM represented the cultural pressure to be accepted socially and the fear of being shunned in her community.

Luckily for her, her parents believed in educating a girl child and also passionately thought that teaching a lady would educate the entire world.

This is Rhobi Mwita, the manager in charge of the company’s Innovation and Business Development at UBX Tanzania.

 She has more than eight years of experience in the financial services sector. She has five years of experience in the banking sector and four years in the financial sector.

She says being in the industry for nine years has helped her build her career, despite the fact that there are frequently many prospects for progression within the banking and financial institutions; many more advanced roles do call for licenses, certifications, or graduate degrees.

“My organisation has been providing training through on-the-job training or employer-funded education programs, which has helped me advance my career,” says Rhobi.

Among her accomplishments is having held a managerial position for more than 5 years as a young woman entrusted by her company to lead.

She says the company’s innovation is directed and managed by an innovation manager. As the manager in charge of innovation, she constantly includes and works with other team members to achieve innovation goals by creating effective strategies that might lead to innovation success for the company.

 “Innovation is one of our core values. UBX operates in an industry where innovation is critical to daily life; as a company, we believe we will perish if we do not constantly innovate,” says Rhobi.

She says that they have IT products and services that they provide to the market in different sectors, some of which are targeting relatively smaller organisations such as SACCOS, but also bigger organisations. All those services and products have come out of the innovation of our teams.

The services offered by UBX Tanzania include IT support and managed services, infrastructure solutions, private cloud solutions, cybersecurity, ATMs, mobile banking, agency banking, Internet banking, core banking systems, visa processors, applications, train management systems, school management systems, ticket Mtandao systems, SMS gateways, MNO/Banks bulk disbursements, and system development as per user request.

Commenting on the challenges she is going through in her career and how she is overcoming them, she says women are underrepresented in leadership positions across the board. McKinsey and Company’s report found that, for many reasons, women are less likely to advance in their careers than men.

“You will likely be working with a male boss and won’t have many female role models to look to or have as a mentor. This means less access to senior leadership, which likely means fewer leadership opportunities for you. With this, I am working on being a positive agent of change. Keep blazing my trail. Truly, there has never been a better time to be a woman in the workforce,” she adds. Being the agent of change started when in her primary school she came across an organisation Adventist Development  and Relief Agency (ADRA) in Kenya that encouraged women’s empowerment and quality, and they educated her on the FGM negative impacts, such as the practice having no health benefits for girls and women and causing severe bleeding and problems such as urinating, later cysts, infections, complications in childbirth, and an increased risk of newborn deaths.

“As a young woman, I wanted to make a difference in my society and also be a living testimony to other girls in my society by obtaining my higher education without undergoing FGM and other traditional activities. I graduated with my Bachelor of Information Systems degree in 2015, believing that a girl child can study until the higher levels if given the support, equality and opportunity,” she says.

When asked if she ever felt indebted to rescue a girl child in her community, which does not prioritize education for girls, she says she started a Girls Empowerment Initiative just last year. And she will be meeting girls each December.

So far, she has been able to pay school fees for two girls who are currently enrolled in secondary school. But the initiative will be able to provide basic requirements for those who are unable to do so.

Commenting on how we can change bad cultures that prevent women from living their career dreams, she says, as boys and men see more educated girls in their midst, she believes they will be more likely to abandon their archaic perceptions of women as inferior and mere sexual objects with no meaningful role to play outside the home.

“Only as we create, so to speak, facts on the ground, that is to say, real and tangible change, will we have any chance of moving attitudes and perceptions in a positive direction,” she says.

Her message to the government and to young girls and women living in a community with bad cultures is to have a direct economic, social, and health investment in girls. This doesn’t just help girls and women; the evidence is overwhelming and conclusive that, as the wellbeing of girls and women improves, boys and men are better off, too.