Inclusive Leadership is the Most Effective COVID Response

Women are best placed to respond to the global health crisis in the Arab region and Africa because they have been dealing with crisis daily. That was one of the messages from Karama’s founder and CEO Hibaaq Osman during the Fundación Mujeres por África and Yale Africa webinar last week.

In the panel moderated by Biola Alabi, Hibaaq spoke alongside Neila Chaabane, Tunisia’s former State Secretary for Women and Family, Obiageli Ezekwesili, Co-Founder of the #BringBackOurGirls movement and a former presidential candidate in Nigeria, and from Cameroon, Kah Walla, entrepreneur, activist, political leader and CEO of STRATEGIES!.

Hibaaq explored the lessons we could take from women’s leadership during the COVID-19 crisis, from world leaders to women ensuring that needs are met at local level. She told the panel that effective leadership needs to be responsive to remain relevant.

Read Hibaaq’s full remarks below

Hibaaq Osman, Women Leading in Times of Crisis Webinar, 23rd July 2020

It is a great pleasure to be with you today in this discussion. I want to focus my contribution on leadership, and the lessons we can take from the global crisis, with thee three points in particular.

The first point on global leadership.

When we ask the question what - in leadership terms - links Germany, New Zealand, Taiwan, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Denmark, there are of course two answers.

They have all been recognized for their effective leadership during the global health crisis, and they are all led by women.

I think we have all seen and shared images on social media celebrating these women and the leadership they have shown.

But these countries have not done better in responding to the crisis simply because they are led by women. There is, however, a fundamental link between the two things.

A country that has a more functional culture of politics and governance will be both more likely to deal well with crisis, and be more likely to be inclusive in its representation and leadership.

Leadership is not just about the president or prime minister, the CEO or director. It is about systems, it is about culture.

A politics in which women or minorities are less likely to succeed, in which artificial, systemic and cultural barriers favor candidates from particular groups and hold back others, is a dysfunctional politics. That will have knock on effects in leadership, and these effects have been exposed ruthlessly by the crisis.

The lesson is then not as simple as if you want good governance, elect women. It is that we must foster a politics that is inclusive, in which women and minorities are able to demonstrate their skill and leadership.

But that is not to say there are not easier lessons to draw from the crisis.

A number of the countries noted to have had the worst crisis responses share very similar characteristics. They have governments led by populists who like to make a show of their masculinity - they want everyone to know just how macho they are.

These leaders have all been openly disrespectful to the women who have been their political rivals.

These leaders have have been found desperately wanting in the crisis.

The second lesson I would draw is that women are already leading work on the ground, they know where the need is, and that is why it is so important for them to be involved in leadership and decision making.

In the early stages of the crisis we spoke to women across Africa and the Middle East to understand how they were responding to the changing situation on the ground.

We heard directly about the remarkable innovation and dedication of women’s groups.

To give you some examples, these women were:

• Increasing the operation of helplines to assist women suffering from violence in the family

• Using their existing networks to produce PPE for their own organizations and others

• Distributing food and support

• Moving their work online, understanding how they could still provide desperately needed support and services

The women in our network have untold experience of dealing with unmet needs.

They have been preparing for this crisis by dealing with crisis on a daily basis. They have experienced conflict, humanitarian disaster, occupation, instability - all kinds of crisis.

Women’s groups in the region have the networks, they have the credibility, they have the access and expertise. More than that, they have shown the leadership to sustain their organizations through an extraordinary time.

These are the leaders we need to look for in crisis response.

Lastly, we must remember that inclusive and responsive leadership is essential, otherwise who do you hope to lead?

Like many, I have been hugely inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement.

The energy, the passion, the determination that has been focused by Black Lives Matter have been vital - and I used that word deliberately, it is a movement fundamentally about life.

It is also a movement that African Americans had to create, to build from the ground up because there was not a space for their message in the existing progressive movements.

Now, Black Lives Matter has created the largest and most focused mass mobilization for racial justice that America has seen in many years, and many progressive groups - and especially established women’s groups - are essentially irrelevant to it.

If you as a movement will not make room for marginalized groups - whether that’s women, ethnic minorities, young people, LGBT, or whoever - don’t expect them to make time for you.

Black Lives Matter has opened up space for people to talk about their experiences in a way that they were not able to before.

We have seen brave whistleblowers come forward to detail the racism, exclusion, and marginalization they have experienced at campaigning groups as well as national and global institutions that have presented themselves as committed to equality.

This failing has been all too obvious to me and to my colleagues in the Arab region and Africa.

As a network of activists dedicated to addressing the inequalities in our own societies, of course we have recognized the inequalities that exist even in the feminist movements that have sought to ally with us. The movements have often been nothing of the sort - stale, establishment, talking to no one but themselves.

The message for all of us is clear. Get relevant, or get out of the way.

North Africa and the Middle East has experienced an extraordinary period, with coronavirus yet another challenge. To survive through financial crisis, dictatorships, revolutions, civil wars, instability - that takes enormous resilience. So there is so much we can learn from the women leaders who have made it through. We will need their leadership to take us through this crisis and to recover from it.

In every crisis, there is a huge risk that hard-won progress will be rolled back, that equality will be treated as a luxury, rather than essential for recovery.

Women in Africa and the Middle East have proven time and again that they can to more than pick up the pieces in the wake of crisis.

They need to be on the crisis committees, they need to be leading locally, nationally and internationally, ensuring a whole-community approach to response and recovery.