On Position, Power and the Economics of African Women’s Leadership
International Women’s Day arrives this week. And with it, the familiar season of panels, pledges, and professional development workshops reminding women to negotiate harder, ask bolder, and advocate for themselves more loudly.
This column wants to say something different.
We have spent the better part of two decades coaching African women to ask louder, negotiate harder, and lean in further. We have built workshops around it. Sold conferences on it. Built entire coaching industries on the premise that if a woman simply improved her ask – her tone, her timing, her confidence – the boardroom would open.
It hasn’t.
And it’s time we said so plainly: the problem was never how women asked. It was not what we were asking for at all.
Asking is a position of subordination.
That statement deserves to be interrogated. Not all asking is equal. A founder asking an investor for capital is asking, but from a position she has spent years building. A CEO requesting a board mandate is asking, but inside a power dynamic that runs in multiple directions. In the right hands, the ask is a strategic instrument, not a supplicant gesture.
But that is precisely the point. In those cases, the ask has something behind it. A track record. An alternative. A consequence if the answer is ‘no’. The asking is almost incidental—it is the leverage that does the actual work.
Strip the leverage away, and what remains? Asking without leverage is not negotiation. It is hope.
And hope, however determined, is not a power strategy.
The negotiation myth
Let’s start with what the research actually says, not the self-help version of it.
Studies consistently show that women who negotiate assertively are penalised for doing so. They are perceived as aggressive, difficult, and a particular favourite of the performance review — “not a culture fit”. The advice to negotiate boldly was never designed for environments where women are already operating against a credibility deficit. It assumed a level playing field that has never existed and, in many African corporate and institutional contexts, barely exists as a concept.
In environments where deference to seniority is not just expected but structurally enforced, where asking above your station is read as insubordination rather than ambition, the “ask bolder” mandate doesn’t liberate women. It exposes them.
And the women who internalise the failure end up assuming they didn’t ask correctly. They sign up for the next negotiation workshop. The cycle continues.
There is nothing wrong with these women. There is something wrong with the advice.
What power actually looks like
Power in professional ecosystems is not granted through negotiation. It is built through position, and position is built through proximity, ownership, and structural leverage.
Watch the women in your organisation who move. Not the ones who are liked. Not even the ones who are loud. The ones who move, who get resources, who shape decisions, who are called before the meeting, not after it. What do they have?
They sit close to where money is decided, not just where it is discussed. They have built relationships that predate the formal ask. They have made themselves difficult to exclude, not by demanding inclusion, but by becoming load-bearing in systems that need them. They have, in many cases, built something of their own.
That is not negotiation. That is architecture.
The economics of women’s leadership are not about salary conversations. It is about where you are positioned in the value chain and whether you are close enough to power to shape it rather than petition it.
The African context is not a footnote.
Here is what the imported playbooks miss entirely: the professional landscape for women across African markets operates on a distinct set of social contracts.
In many of our contexts, a woman who negotiates visibly is navigating not just gender bias but a web of expectations around age, respect for hierarchy, ethnic and regional dynamics, family reputation, and what ambition is permitted to look like on a woman who is also a daughter, a wife, and a community member.
The woman in Lagos who asks boldly in a salary negotiation is not having the same conversation as her peer in San Francisco. She is managing what her directness signals to a male boss who is also her father’s colleague. She is calculating whether the win in this room costs her in the next one. She is aware that networks here run deep and long and that burning a bridge professionally can mean something it does not mean elsewhere.
These are not weaknesses. They are data. And they demand a different strategy.
The strategy is not to overcome these dynamics through sheer nerve. It is to understand them well enough to move through them and to build the kind of position where you are less dependent on the goodwill of the room.
This is the conversation that does not happen at imported leadership summits, where the content is designed for a different woman in a different economy. Our women deserve frameworks built from our own ground up.
A position is built, not asked for
So what does this actually mean in practice? It begins with a shift in orientation, away from negotiating for resources and toward controlling them. The most powerful women in any ecosystem are the ones who influence where budgets go, not the ones who negotiate their portion of what remains. If you find yourself perpetually at the table asking, the more useful question is whether you are positioned at the source of decisions or merely at their distribution point.
It also means reconsidering where you build. Vertical relationships, mentors, sponsors, and senior champions have their place. But in African professional networks, horizontal power is consistently underestimated. Peer networks built across industries, functions, and markets compound into influence that no single senior relationship can replicate. The women who move across this continent do not do it alone, and they do not do it only upward. They do it laterally, through trust built over time with people who are growing alongside them.
Visibility matters too. Last week’s column on the visibility economy addressed that case. But visibility without leverage is just exposure. Your name carries weight in a room when your absence would actually be felt. The work is to build toward that, not simply to be seen.
And underneath all of it is ownership. A portfolio, a client base, a platform, and a body of work that travels with you regardless of which organisation you are inside. The most professionally protected women in any market have built something that belongs to them. When you own something of genuine value, the dynamic shifts entirely. You do not ask. You offer terms.
None of this is fast. All of it is intentional. And it begins with a decision to stop optimising the ask and start engineering the position.
A word on who gave us this advice
The negotiation-first doctrine was handed to African professional women largely by people and systems for whom asking bolder did work. It worked for women in markets with stronger legal protections, longer histories of women in leadership, and more codified HR accountability. It worked, too, for women already close enough to power that a confident ask was the last remaining obstacle.
For the rest of us, it was a shortcut that skipped over the harder structural question: not How do we ask better?, but How do we build the kind of position where the terms are ours to set?
We should be generous with those who offered this advice. Many of them meant it. But we must also be honest: advice that was right for one context, one generation, or one market, imported wholesale into ours, is not neutral. It shapes how women understand their failures. It locates the problem in the woman’s execution rather than in the structure she is navigating.
That misdiagnosis is expensive. It costs women years. It costs them confidence spent in the wrong direction. And it costs the broader ecosystem the kind of structural thinking that would actually move things.
The game is slower than a negotiation workshop promises. It is more deliberate. It requires building over years, not asking in moments.
But it is the right game.
The column that comes next
Next week, this column takes on another dimension of the same problem: who is advising African women on how to build this kind of power, and whether those advisors are genuinely serving the next generation or quietly steering them with maps drawn for a world that no longer exists.
Female mentorship is one of the most powerful forces available to professional women in this ecosystem. It is also, when it operates on old frameworks, one of the most quietly limiting.
The women ahead of us broke through on terms that cost them something. Sometimes those costs become the standard they unconsciously impose on those who follow. We will examine that honestly, with respect, and without flinching.
More on that next week.
For now: Stop perfecting your ask. Start engineering your position.
The women. Wealth. Power. The column appears weekly in BusinessDay. It examines the structural, economic, and strategic realities shaping African women in leadership.
Udo Okonjo; Founder, Radiant Collective Capital. Executive Chair, Fine & Country West Africa; Women, Wealth & Power Columnist, BusinessDay.
