Melinda French Gates Highlights Women Inspiring Change in Their Communities in Senegal

For a Prosperous Future, Look to the Women, By Melinda French Gates

The power of women entrepreneurs

After 20 years of visiting the continent and working with its leaders, Melinda French Gates was not surprised to see African solutions to Africa’s challenges. Nor was she surprised that so many of the talented people behind those solutions were women.

Two women in their 20s created E-cover, the Dakar-based tire upcycler. Women make up 70% of the students at the University of Global Health Equity, the medical school she visited in Butaro, Rwanda, and half the staff at Institut Pasteur de Dakar, a renowned research institution and vaccine and diagnostic manufacturer.

These women are playing an important role in Africa’s bright future. But to get there, they, like women around the world, have had to persevere through economic hardships, unequal distribution of caregiving responsibilities, and a pervasive cultural norm that women belong, above all, in the home. Their hard-won success lifts up their families and communities. And healthy, empowered women contribute to improved health equity, technological advances, and stronger financial futures for all. The World Bank estimates that if women had the opportunity to earn as much as men, total global wealth would increase by 14%.

Achieving gender equality is a global challenge — especially since the pandemic exacerbated the gender gap — and a global opportunity. They’ve learned a lot at the Gates Foundation about what is possible when women have an equal chance to fulfill their potential. They’ve also learned what it takes. Instead of leaving it up to individual women to surmount systemic barriers on their own, leaders can unlock progress much faster by implementing intentional policies and practices to remove those barriers altogether.

As a 20-year-old business student in Dakar, Yaye Souadou Fall knew she wouldn’t be able to find work when she graduated. The labor market in Senegal was just too grim. So instead of spending her energy looking for a job that didn’t exist, she and her classmate, Khady Diallo, decided to create their own.

Inspiration struck from the unlikeliest of places: the abandoned tires strewn around Dakar, marring the city’s landscape. The tires were more than just unsightly—they were breeding grounds for mosquitos that spread malaria, and they often ended up ablaze, exposing millions of people to toxic fumes.

In 2015, Yaye and Khady founded the country’s first and only tire-recycling company, E-cover. E-cover turns discarded truck tires into three major products: AstroTurf filler (specifically, the FIFA-certified crumb rubber used for soccer fields), tire chips that cement factories use as a lower-emission form of fuel, and metal rods that get melted down and used in construction.

Starting a company is rarely glamorous work, and Yaye’s experience was no different. In the early days, the two women worked in Yaye’s backyard, breaking down tires using a meat grinder and spoons. They entered competitions and applied for grants, eventually pulling in the funding they needed to get off the ground.

“We were often told that, ‘You are too young, you’re a woman, it’s too big,” Yaye said. But eventually, they found an investor—the women-founded and women-led Women’s Investment Club—who saw the company’s potential and helped Yaye and Khady prove that these two young women were precisely the right people to bring their big idea to life.

Meet our Finalists: Yaye Souadou Fall

A World Bank study across 10 African countries found that companies owned by men had six times the capital investment of companies owned by women. In Senegal, even though 31% of businesses are owned by women, they only have access to 3.5% of available capital. Women are more likely than men to lack collateral and face both gender bias and a high cost of capital.

Thanks to efforts like Yaye Souadou Fall and Khady Diallo, more communities are changing their views of women — and beginning to prosper. When the experiences of women like them are no longer minimized, and when Africa’s leaders are able to see unlimited potential in all the continent’s women, they’ll be able to unlock extraordinary progress for all.

Sources: