“We are no longer asking for a seat at the table. We are redesigning the table itself — and the most radical act of leadership is doing it whole.”
There is a particular kind of weight that settles over a room of African women who have stopped asking for permission. I felt it this past week when I had the privilege of closing the HER Economy 2026 African Women Financial Inclusion Summit — not with a keynote, not with a policy paper, but with a mental health release session. And in that choice of closing, there was a message worth unpacking for every business leader reading this column.
The summit, themed “Setting the System — From Inclusion to Ownership,” brought together investors, policymakers, institutional leaders and women entrepreneurs from across the continent for two days of conversations that refused to stay comfortable. The organising question was deceptively simple: who owns the system? The answers were anything but.
Inclusion is no longer the goal
Day one opened with a provocation from Dr Geraldine Joslyn Fraser-Moleketi, who challenged delegates to move beyond access and toward structural transformation. The room agreed. What emerged over two days was a hard consensus that inclusion — once the rallying cry of women’s economic empowerment — is now an insufficient ambition. Participation without ownership, the summit made plain, is not economic transformation. It is decoration.
The statistics are sobering. One in four entrepreneurs on the continent is a woman. Women power a significant share of Africa’s economy. Yet only a fraction of institutional capital and procurement opportunities reaches women-owned businesses. As one speaker put it with surgical precision: “The issue is no longer participation. The issue is architecture.”
The power to allocate capital
What set HER Economy 2026 apart from other women’s forums I have attended was its willingness to name power directly. Real power, delegates were told repeatedly, is the power to allocate capital. Not to access it. Not to be granted it. To decide where it goes. That means pension funds rethinking long-term African investment models. It means banks interrogating whether their risk frameworks are genuinely about risk — or whether exclusion has simply been institutionalised under professional language. It means procurement officers asking whose businesses are being defined as investable, and why.
“Courage over comfort” became something of an unofficial motto for day two — a call directed not just at women leaders, but at the institutions, investors and policymakers in the room. Transformation through incrementalism and symbolic gestures, the summit argued, is not transformation at all.
Wellbeing is not a soft issue
Which brings me to why a mental health release session closed the summit — and why I believe that choice was not incidental but intentional. Across two days, the agenda wove together topics that are rarely placed in the same room: capital allocation, gender-based violence, menopause, resilience, data accountability, wealth creation. The message was deliberate: you cannot separate women’s wellbeing from women’s economic participation. Silence on health, on safety, on the inner life of leadership has a cost — and that cost is ultimately economic.
Day one closed with my session on mental resilience and human flourishing, reminding delegates that sustainable ownership also requires emotional architecture which I called “I Am Whole”. A leader who is running on empty does not make transformative decisions. An entrepreneur managing unspoken health challenges does not scale equitably. The body and the balance sheet, it turns out, are in conversation.
The mental health release I facilitated at the close of the summit was, in that context, not a departure from the serious business of the two days. It was a completion of it. We had spent 48 hours talking about redesigning systems. The session invited every woman in the room to also attend to the inner systems — the ones that carry the weight of leadership, visibility, risk and legacy.
The table is being redesigned
HER Economy 2026 closed with a declaration that I suspect will stay with everyone in that room for some time: “We are no longer asking for a seat at the table. We are redesigning the table itself.” That is not rhetoric. It is strategy. And for those of us in business — whether in finance, policy, entrepreneurship or leadership development — the question is no longer whether we support women’s economic inclusion. The question is whether we are willing to support genuine redesign. The two are not the same thing.
For me, closing a continental summit on financial inclusion with a mental health release was a reminder that the work of economic transformation is never only structural. It is also deeply human. And perhaps the most radical thing we can do, as African women building and leading in this moment, is insist that both things are true at once.
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Dr. Joshua Awesome is a Coaching Psychologist/Executive and Business Performance Coach who has supported over 100,000 professionals across Africa and the globe. He can be reached via: joshua@africainmind.org
When women own the room — and the system