My Moral Compass: Patricia Nzolantima on Smart Investing, Perseverance, and Building Women Leaders across Africa
By Stacey Lindsay
Patricia Nzolantima has an almost startling lack of pretense. Given Nzolantima’s resume—she’s a global entrepreneur who’s founded numerous enterprises that empower women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)—it’s easy to assume she might be too busy or guarded to offer much of her time. (One friend of The Conscious Investor describes Nzolantima as someone who should ‘run for President one day.’) But as we meet with her over Zoom, she is giving and generous. She talks about beauty and style. She makes you laugh and feel as though there are no geographical or time barriers between you.
Nzolantima has always been led by a unique business spirit. As a teen in the DRC, she’d bring books back from travels with her family to sell to the students at her school. In college, she started a small enterprise cleaning clothing and another sewing garments for people in the nearby plant. Of her work ethic, she says, “I always wanted to have my own money.”
What Nzolantima didn’t always want, or rather what she didn’t always plan for, was to be her own boss. She studied law in university because she wanted “to give a voice to the voiceless” and had thought she would likely go work for a big institution or the United Nations. But when a large company, Exp Agency, learned of her unique business acumen, they hired her to lead marketing efforts. Soon, she left her native DRC for Senegal where she heralded marketing efforts for large accounts there including Nestle.
After garnering experience in this field and catching the eye of many businesspeople in and around Africa, Nzolantima decided to open her own marketing agency, CommunicArt, in the DRC. The agency was progressive, and Nzolantima fueled it with her experimental and creative views. Soon after, the heads of Exp Agency came calling back, this time wanting to partner. They merged forces to form EXP-CommunicArt and together garnered world-recognized clients from Coca-Cola to PNG to Unilever.
It was around this time that Nzolantima started concentrating on a question that had long been lingering in her mind: “How can I empower women?” She says this query was from her heart, but it also stemmed from her personal experience. Nzolantima had been facing financial problems, and she realized that this was a symptom of a bigger issue—the lack of financial education and career mentorship for women. “I am a businesswoman, I am a hard worker, I don’t sleep if I don’t finish work, but they did not teach me how to manage cash flow, how to be a good leader, how to think in the future,” she says of her business community. These realizations sparked in Nzolantima a drive to help “other women to not fail in the way that I did.”
She began mentoring females who were seeking creative branding and marketing support in the business world. This coincided with her starting International Working Lady, a magazine featuring honest, raw, true stories of working women—including herself. “They say ‘wow, look at you, you’re YPO, you’re successful, you travel’ but they don’t know my journey, they just see the outside, but they don’t see the kind of life I had, how hard it was, the way I grew up,” she says. In being honest about the hardships, Nzolantima says more women can find their voice and direction.
Nzolantima’s insistence on examining the needs of women in the working world is what led her to her true calling. She started focusing on how to encourage women’s ideas and help them grow. This actualized into the Working Ladies WIA Hub, her “destiny,” as she describes it. The first female-focused accelerator in the DNC, the hub offers African women entrepreneurs financial education, mentorship, business coaching, and proximity with prospective impactful investors. “I wanted to build a social enterprise,” Nzolantima says. “These are extraordinary people, and yes, they have an income, but their focus is creating an impact and changing people’s lives.” Working Ladies has a membership that is near 2000 women today. It has spawned other women-focused endeavors, including Woman of the Future, a program focused on creating a development bank.
For Nzolantima, working to lift women is a way to merge her purpose with profits and better the world. It’s also a way to explore her creative side; to push boundaries and bring new ideas to light. She does this with one of her most recent businesses, Ubizcabs, a taxi service company that trains and offers equity to local women by giving them a microloan to buy their own car to drive. (Ubizcabs is a product of the efforts of Women of the Future.) By investing in women, they become more invested in their work and their potential—thus, building women’s equity in Africa. “We are creating the next millionaires,” she says. “The next economic leaders of tomorrow.”
They are also creating the future of investing, Nzolantima insists. Investors want to put their capital toward purpose and creations that are changing lives, she says. “People value your company because of the impact.” She takes Ubizcabs as an example. “They [customers and investors] say, let me use those taxicabs because they are empowering women.” The vision, faith, purpose, impact, humanity, and passion are the drivers in Nzolantima’s eyes, and the smarter spaces in which to invest.
To take a macro view is to see that Nzolantima’s accomplishments and responsibilities are colossal. She’s still managing partner of EXP-CommunicArt, which now has nineteen offices in fifteen countries across Africa. She’s head of Ubizcabs and now Ubizjets, which offers private jet transport. She’s a mentor. An impact investor. She’s one of the first members of the Young African Leaders, an initiative created by the US Department of State under President Obama’s administration. And she’s the 2020 recipient of the Young Presidents Organization Global Impact Award.
“It has been a long journey,” Nzolantima says. All the wins and all the hardships have brought with them lessons and more fuel to keep going. “You remember how much you got in the past, and today that has [built] who you are.” Who she is today is a woman focused on never slowing down, and on always improving the lives of others. By 2050, she has a goal to reach and empower 1 million women across all fifty-four countries in Africa. She’s on her way—and she’s pulling from the keen insight she has had since she was a teenager, keeping her focus on the things that matter. “I don’t want to be driven by money,” she says. “I want to be driven by changing people’s lives.”
To learn more about Patricia Nzolantima, visit workingladieshub.com.
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