Miranda Naiman
BUILDING A GROWTH STATE GENERATION Empower is an award-winning Tanzanian human capital consulting firm with a global reach. Women make up 70 per cent of its talented team, all dedicated to providing career lift-off to the country’s brightest young talent. Twiga speaks to its award-winning and adventurous founder, Miranda Naiman
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hen the grand ceremony for the Tanzania Consumer Choice Awards 2020 was held in Dar es Salaam’s Mtana Hall in December last year, the winner of the Most Preferred Female CEO of the Year, Miranda Naiman, was not there to pick up her award. She was far away from the evening’s glitz and glamour, fighting for each breath on a final push to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. The climb was the latest in a long line of challenges the entrepreneur sets herself as part of the growth mindset that has helped her increase the revenue of her human capital consultancy firm Empower by at least 20 per cent each year since it began more than a decade ago. That mindset is also entrenched in the culture of the company and the now more than three million people across Africa that Empower has helped secure rewarding jobs or furthered their personal development through its workshops, academies and other initiatives.
Positive thinking Naiman was one of only three in her expedition group to battle through the altitude sickness and arrive at the 5,895-metre high Uhuru Peak, a feat she puts down to positive thinking. “It was not about being the fittest, it was being mentally strong. Before I set out, I told myself ‘I will get to the top’. Near the end
my heart was thumping in my chest with every step, but giving up was not an option.” Naiman and her carefully selected Empower team have helped many others find similar motivation from within to pursue a meaningful career path. The self-described “accidental entrepreneur” began Empower in 2009 as a solo consultancy that gave her the flexibility to work around being a new – and single – mum. She sees her son, Micah, who was born a year earlier, as the inspiration that drove her to make a success of the venture. “Every time I looked at him, I knew I could not fail,” she says. Now Naiman has a “dream team” of 19 staff that work with a host of blue-chip clients across Tanzania and into East Africa with plans in place to extend operations across the continent. Empower’s portfolio of services encompasses human resource consultancy, recruitment and business insight. The team helps connect the talent pool of Tanzanian graduates with the corporate world, fills vacancies across sectors such as banking, manufacturing and energy and provides data analysis to help drive results for businesses. There’s no shortage of people in need of the company’s help. According to the World Health Organisation, 800,000 individuals enter the Tanzanian job market every year. For Naiman there is “great potential” for development here if
Founder of Empower Miranda Naiman
these young people are given knowledge and opportunities and she sees Empower, “with its understanding of employers and the labour market” as ideally placed to deliver a solution.
Support for students
Naiman took on Mt Kilimanjaro in 2020
Figures from the Tanzania Commission for Universities show that in the academic year 2019/20 there were 55,760 new student admissions with numbers having risen by almost 50 per cent since the 2012/13 intake. These institutions should contain some of the country’s best and brightest young people, but there are concerns too many leave unequipped for employment. Naiman applauds students who signal early business initiative by pursuing start-up opportunities while still at university and, as a member of entrepreneurs’ network EO Tanzania she is among the judges selecting the winner of its annual Global Student Entrepreneur Awards.
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