Last Monday, April 29, Standard Bank brought together clients, employees and prominent women in various sectors in Maputo, with the aim of discussing the challenges and opportunities facing Mozambican women, promoting dialogue and the search for joint solutions.

The meeting, which marked the end of a wide range of activities carried out by the bank as part of its Women's Month celebrations, had the theme "Investing in Women is Accelerating Progress".

Speaking on the occasion, the Chairman of Standard Bank's Board of Directors, Esselina Macome, highlighted the importance of investing in women, namely in creating proactive policies that go beyond merely ensuring gender equality within institutions: "Initiatives such as the bank's Business Incubator and programs such as Lioness, iDeate and iCreate, which take place in this space, demonstrate how Standard Bank puts this approach into practice, through targeted support for female entrepreneurs and encouraging female participation in areas such as science and technology," she said.

The event featured a panel discussion with Ana Flávia Azinheira, former deputy minister of Youth and Sports and current president of the Mozambique Veterinary Doctors Association, Xi Hui, secretary general of the Mozambique-China Chamber of Commerce, Vitória Langa, executive director of the National Research Fund (FNI) and Guerra Mandlate, director of People and Culture at Standard Bank.

Speaking moments after the conference, Ana Flávia Azinheira considered the event to be an important movement to look at the situation of women: "When we look at women, we see that their problem is global, so initiatives like this will allow us to be clear about how to intervene so that we have a truly imponderable and healthy woman who can bring about changes to develop the country," she said.

For her part, Vitória Langa stressed the need to boost the new vision of women being educated in order to drive progress: "Progress cannot be made without interaction, without cooperativism. This interactive dynamic will underpin all transformation".

As challenges, Vitoria Langa suggested that the bank should embark on funding research, to understand what the real needs of each group of women are, namely women scientists, saleswomen, among others, so that they can embrace the sciences, such as engineering, mathematics, technology, which are the platform for advancement in the future.

FNI's executive director pointed out that open science was on the horizon and that policies needed to be drawn up so that scientists didn't stop producing: "On the issue of the green economy, we have to come together and respond to everything we have and with all the intelligence that Africa has. We have to look at the issue of climate change, because these are phenomena that are coming," he said.

For Xi Hui, secretary general of the Mozambique-China Chamber of Commerce, it's not enough for society to just talk about the care and policies that need to be taken into account to empower women, and it's necessary to come up with concrete ideas: "Standard Bank is developing the right initiatives to help women in the process of integrating into society," she said.

During the meeting, some participants considered that systematic reflection on the role of women makes them feel the need to look at women as a vector for growth, pointing out that the slogan chosen for this conversation is in line with the main problem we are experiencing today.

In conclusion, the participants argued in their speeches that it is not possible to achieve women's empowerment without working with women in education to make them realize how important they are in the community.