INSPIRED BY AFRICA

Microsoft South Africa CFO Welela Dawit considers herself fortunate to be a finance leader at a time of massive transformation on the continent. Puseletso Mompei caught up with her to find out how she is driving the agenda.

Welela Dawit was born in Ethiopia and raised in Eritrea. When she was three years old, her parents, who worked for international agencies, moved the family to the US.

“I am lucky to have the parents I have,” she says. “They travelled a lot and showed me the world very early on. That’s equipped me with the emotional intelligence that I need to be a leader as well as being adaptable and having reference points from life experiences to figure out how to navigate whatever situations I find myself in.”

Her parents planted a bug of curiosity, desire for travel and being adventurous, something which has shaped her outlook both personally and professionally. However, nothing inspires Welela more than her home continent, Africa.

Welela says she is deeply passionate about people development, particularly in Africa and this was something she was able to delve into during her tenure at General Electric (GE). An economics graduate who joined the multinational after completing her studies, and with her talent for catching the eye of the right people, Welela was put through the Financial Management Programme (FMP).

After her experience on FMP, she then joined GE’s Corporate Audit staff, a global leadership development programme that focused on financial and compliance audits and business advisory assignments for GE’s businesses. “The programme was very demanding, but it was worth it, because it gave me tremendous business acumen and helped me build both hard and soft skills that have been useful throughout my career.”

The programme exposed her to a number of different leadership scenarios, which helped her learn how to navigate ambiguity and be accountable for the development of her team members.

She successfully completed this and other leadership development programmes.

At the age of 27, Welela was offered an opportunity to move to Kenya and became one of the youngest finance executives in the company.

Taking up her role in Kenya was a full circle moment, because it gave her the opportunity to make a mark back in her native East Africa as the financial planning and analysis leader for GE Africa. GE was focused on establishing its presence in emerging markets as the company’s solutions could help solve some of the region’s biggest infrastructure challenges.

“We knew that we needed to start building a pipeline of finance talent, who would eventually take on the roles that we needed to support our businesses,” she says. “The fastest way we could think of accelerating it was launching the FMP for Africa. It was a prime opportunity.”

As the only person in the company who had done the programme, she was responsible for establishing it. “I structured the programme, landing assignments and rotations across the region, and working with my HR team to plan how many people we would need from each country. To recruit candidates, I conducted screening assessments and interviews to determine who would teach classes.”