Opeke
MainOne Managing Director, Funke Opeke, has asked Nigerian women to step forward to take their place and play significant and equal roles in the emerging tech revolution and ecosystem.
“ You have to be in to win; step forward and you would be amazed what you could do, as I did with Mainone, building it to where it is today”, she added, in her admonition to the numerous women who were at the Landmark Centre, Lagos, yesterday, to participate in the 2019 Disrupt 2019 Conference and Masterclass.
No doubt, Opeke is a model for women who want to step forward to disrupt the tech ecosystem. She had played enviable and leading roles in Nigeria’s IT revolution. She was once Chief Technical Officer of MTN Nigeria and briefly served as Chief Operating Officer of NITEL, among others. She left those assignments to found MainOne, operator of the $240 million West Africa’s first privately-owned leading submarine cable network launched On July 22, 2010 to provide broadband and digital connectivity to telecommunication and internet services providers.
MainOne also built West Africa’s largest Tier III Data Center, MDX-i’s Lekki Data Center, a $40 million investment with a capacity for 600 racks.
Though she acknowledged that women, with a growing network of them, are already playing visible roles, in the Nigeria’s tech ecosystem, Opeke insisted that it was imperative for a large number of women to come into the tech space. “Tech does not discriminate, for if you leave women out you create a lot of friction. Fintech will disrupt the banking sector if they do not have more women in the sector”, she further argued.
Opeke was on a panel of four women, who are themselves leaders in the tech space to discuss Women in Technology: Future Perfect Technology. On the panel were also Barbara Iyayi, Managing Director for Africa, Element Inc. United States of America and Adia Sowho, Managing Director and Vice President of Commercial, Mines, Nigeria. The panel was moderated by Audrey Mothupi, Chief Executive Officer, SystemicLogic, South Africa.
She acknowledged that there remains a clear mobile inclusion gap around women, and this could be addressed by providing access opportunity and dealing with income disparity.
Rural women, she noted, have less access to infrastructure and services and there was need to extend pervasive infrastructure and technology to these rural areas where there are large number of rural women, so that all could be better served.
“ As you got to more rural areas and providing infrastructure, technology and services to those rural areas you are reaching out to rural women, because women are more in rural areas”, she added.
