In the spotlight: African women, a hope for the continent

Audio 04:18

The research laboratory at Lambarene Hospital, Gabon.

(illustrative image) AFP / CELIA LEBUR

By: Frédéric Couteau Follow

4 min

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Le Monde Afrique

offers us from this Tuesday a series of portraits and reports on these women who are changing the lines on the continent: they are scientists or entrepreneurs and they represent "

real hope for Africa."

"

There are already great stories, successes that are moving the lines,

relates

Le Monde Afrique.

From Tangier to Johannesburg, university women know how to use their scientific results to create companies with high added value and gain a foothold in the still very masculine world of business.

But they are still exceptions on a road that is not linear.

Choose the world of science or technology, break free from stubborn social norms that make them more stay-at-home mothers than business leaders, complete long studies, and find funding: a tough course .

"

Initially, a survival entrepreneurship ...

In fact, specifies

Le Monde Afrique

, “

African women invent survival entrepreneurship, often to feed their children. With 39.6%, the sub-Saharan strip has the highest percentage of women entrepreneurs in the world. In these lands where wage employment is the exception and not the norm, they are inventing a business within their reach, which provides a solution to the shortcomings of the local offer. It would be more accurate to say that they are trying to do so,

qualifies the newspaper

, because their journey does not necessarily end with the maturation of their business idea… Because then you have to find the funds to get started.

"

Indeed, continues

Le Monde Afrique

, “

secular habits make it more difficult to grant a loan to a woman than to a man, a practice all the more damaging as a business shows an average 34% higher return when 'it is headed by a woman, according to a study by Roland Berger published in March 2020. The addition of these factors explains that, despite the explosion on the continent of start-ups in the field of new technologies, only 27% African women entrepreneurs work in a trade related to technology or science. Yet there is a real solution here to meet the daily challenges of access to water, electricity, education or health that they are faced with every day.

"

Hyam Ali: on the front line against mycetoma

So, the first African woman in the spotlight in

the World Africa

, first portrait this Tuesday, that of Hyam Ali, a 28-year-old scientist who works in Khartoum, and who obtained the Young Talents 2021 prize from the

For Women in Science Africa program

.

Hyam Ali has developed a diagnosis that can detect a tropical disease, mycetoma, a chronic inflammatory disease that causes severe deformities, up to disability.

A disease that affects poor countries and of little interest to large laboratories.

Le Monde Afrique

therefore recounts the journey of this blacksmith's daughter who "

very early on decided not to give up

" and who succeeded in brilliant studies in mathematics, between Sudan, Ghana and France.

In Khartoum, she now teaches math at the university and in her spare time carries out campaigns in schools to make young girls aware of the importance of higher education.

The Maghreb saved by women?

Finally, women always, with this question asked by the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud in

Le Point Afrique

: "

Will the Maghreb be saved by its women?"

", Kamel Daoud who notes that"

the Maghreb, except the Algerian exception, is feminized, even if it is an artifice to hide a still disastrous female condition. Recently, women have been elected or appointed to save countries which remain the property of men.

"And Kamel Daoud to wonder: what is"

could save the so-called Arab countries from Islamism, Turkish vassalization, chauvinist neonationalism, confessional racism and other cultural and sexual miseries.

Answer: to offer, in spite of ourselves, power to women.

It is a counterweight to current models, which do not offer clear definitions of happiness.

Moreover,

he concludes,

one can imagine what religions of fertility, of such unarmourable filiations, would have been monotheisms if they had been invented by women.

"

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