Gender and Diversity at Numida

After spending two months designing and executing Numida’s International Women’s Day Campaign, we wanted to take a step back and talk about how we approach and strive for gender diversity at Numida (based on our company’s leadership, HR policies and decision-making).

Decades of work have been put into bridging the gender gap in workplaces globally and while great strides have been taken to support this cause and substantial progress has been made, there is still a large gender gap and a lot to be done to achieve gender equality in the workplace, on the continent and beyond.

Since our inception in 2016, gender and diversity has been at the forefront of our hiring practices and our company’s headcount growth. While we’ve been growing exponentially, we’ve also managed to tip our gender split, and crossed the 50–50 milestone.

July 2021: 38 employees — 47% female

March 2022: 79 employees — 54% female

We believe this gender inclusion enhances staff retention, drives results and is a pillar of our culture.

• Various perspectives: ensuring both men and women are properly represented on our team has helped us make decisions and tackle problems that consider multiple perspectives. This also leads to more interesting brainstorming sessions, heightened innovation and creativity.
• Increased understanding of our customer needs: our staff are representative of our customer base (for ex. across gender, age, language and regional background) which improves our empathy and understanding of our customer needs. This, alongside in depth customer facing research, guides important product decisions.
• Enhancement of staff retention: if all our staff feel represented and heard they are happier, more motivated and are highly likely to stay at an organization for a long time. At Numida, we have had an employee turnover rate of less than 5% annually.
• Increased profitability: advancing gender equality goes a long way in ensuring an organization attains above average profitability according to research by the Mckinsey Global Institute. At Numida, we’ve found that having gender diversity is part of our secret sauce to strong underwriting and collections performance, since our team can approach customers with different styles of assessment, relationship management and negotiation that lead to strong teamwork and consistent results.

So how do we ensure gender diversity and equality at Numida?

1) Hiring
Numida ensures we close the gender gap by encouraging female applicants to apply, recognizing and then removing biases in the recruitment process to ensure no applicant is discriminated against based on gender, age or ethnicity. We make sure our short listing of candidates is diverse, so we can give female candidates an equal chance, and select top talent across the board. Numida has a zero tolerance policy for nepotism. We hire the best people regardless of their economic or social background, gender or ethnicity.

2) Salaries
Our compensation scheme is transparent, fair and equitable. We have clear salary bands that are monitored to ensure salaries vary only according to responsibility & experience and not due to biases.

3) Promotions
Numida has a non-biased promotion system where all employees have access to a Learning & Development budget. We strive to provide opportunities to promising talent while building our pool of women leaders who will grow into management positions. We currently possess a ratio of 5 men to 6 women in managerial and executive positions.

4) Maternity and Paternity Leave
New mothers at Numida receive 80 calendar days of maternity leave; and new fathers receive 10 days. We make sure to meet Ugandan law and go beyond it where possible, allowing new parents to work from home whenever we can. More importantly, because so many of our team is female we have strengthened handover practices and resources to ensure new parents can fully disconnect from work and focus on their family.

Our objective of financing micro and small businesses cannot be achieved without a diverse, ambitious and high-performing team that is passionate about what they do.

As the month of March gradually comes to a close, we are happy to not only be supporting thousands of women-owned businesses in Uganda but are also proud of the strides we have taken to ensure Numida is a company that is gender inclusive.