Interview with Yann Borgstedt, Founder and President of The Womanity Foundation
Earlier this year, at the Share Her Voice conference in Paris (organized by Empow’Her and Wikistage), W4 heard about many amazing women and men working toward women’s empowerment around the world, from Brazil to Pakistan, Afghanistan to Thailand.
One of the most inspiring stories was that of Yann Borgstedt, Founder and President of The Womanity Foundation and a vocal champion of girls’ and women’s human rights. Our team had the opportunity to ask Yann a few questions about his trajectory, the Foundation’s history and activities, and what motivated him to focus on girls’ and women’s empowerment. We were particularly interested in his perspective as a man and as a financial investor working in the field of women’s rights.
Can you tell us about yourself, your career as an entrepreneur, and what motivated you to create the Womanity Foundation?
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Yann Borgstedt |
I started in business very young, founding an internet company that became quite successful. I believe that with success comes responsibility, so I decided to create a foundation. For our first project we teamed up with a charity that provides support for single mothers. We realized that many of the single mothers were former maids, with very little education, so we decided to work on ways to enable girls to go back to school. Today I spend half of my time working on my businesses and the other half on philanthropy. I work with my foundation, also with Ashoka and a few other projects. It’s good to do different things because you get inspired, you take a step back to see what other people are doing, and ask yourself how can you do your own work better.
The Womanity Foundation focuses on women’s education, training and development in different regions of the world, including countries such as Afghanistan, Brazil, Egypt, India, and Morocco. Could you tell us about some of the initiatives that your Foundation has supported?
Our programs are divided into four pillars. The first is in Afghanistan, with the goal of improving girls’ education. We’re working in schools alongside the Afghan government, improving the teachers’ training and helping to develop curricula.
The second pillar focuses on harnessing the media to empower women. We’ve launched the first radio station for women in the West Bank and Gaza, Radio Nissa, and we are currently creating a platform with content for the radio station to reach all of the Middle East. This project is linked to a fiction program we started on the radio, about a young Egyptian girl and her life. The project combines education and entertainment, and uses media as an awareness-raising tool.
Our third pillar is a fellowship program called WomenChangeMakers. We select fellows using the same system as Ashoka, and we support women entrepreneurs who work on women’s empowerment initiatives. We’re very selective and we bring in different partners to collaborate with and support the fellows. This is how the program has operated in India and Brazil.
The fourth pillar consists of our Womanity Award, which focuses on one crucial phenomenon that transcends all borders: violence against women. Violence afflicts women in the developed world and the developing world and is independent of a woman’s level of education. We created the award to inspire people to come up with the most innovative solution – harnessing information and communication technologies – for tackling violence against women; this way we can team up an innovative partner with a replication partner.
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For Yann, the strength of all four pillars of the Foundation’s work is based on the organisation’s capacity for renewal — an insight he gained from his experience in the financial sector. “As a foundation, you grow, you make mistakes, and my philosophy is that you need to take risks. If you take risks, you are going to fail at some point. If you don’t fail enough, it’s because you have not taken enough risks. We’re never going to be the biggest foundation, so an important objective for us is to take risks that other foundations are not willing to take. That’s part of our philosophy”.
What role do men play in women’s empowerment?
We need to find a way to make men understand that the patriarchal mindset is not good for society. As a businessman, I look at it this way: if half of my assets are unused, then I don’t have a successful strategy. Changing the way that men look at women is probably the most difficult way forward because it’s about changing mindsets and deep-set patterns — but it is the only solution in the long term.
What motivated you to participate in the Empow’Her conference?
I believe that if you are able to contribute something to society and inspire people to do something positive, then it’s important to do so. Alone, I am not going to change the world; that happens when all of us do something together. But if I inspire even one person by sharing what we do at the Womanity Foundation, then that’s already enough.
Progress for girls and women can be achieved only if we engage men in the push to support girls’ and women’s human rights. W4 salutes and celebrates the work and passionate commitment of Yann Borgstedt and the Womanity Foundation, whose exciting projects are driving on-the-ground positive change for girls and women, and their communities, around the world.
Click here to find out more about Radio Nissa, the Womanity Foundation’s fellowship programs and their other creative, innovative projects around the globe.
