Jumia, Africa's biggest e-commerce is making different kind of headlines in Nigeria besides market size and business performance. As part of its contribution to the  March 8 celebration of International Women's Day, the company announced that it has charted a course for female empowerment  in Nigeria where its top leadership is  100% female.

 Nigerian Juliet Anammah and Senegalese Fatoumata Ba are the phenomenal  women poised to push  Jumia Nigeria to greater heights. Juliet Anammah, comes with more than 15 years’ experience in consulting with leading firm Accenture in Nigeria while  Fatoumata Ba led Nigeria’s largest online retailer earlier on in 2015 after having first founded and successfully grown Jumia in Ivory Coast since 2013.
* Anammah 
Both women, interviewed for Women’s Day, shared  their vision on gender parity, most particularly in the tech world, and on leading Africa’s first unicorn’s flagship:
* Fatoumata Ba
“Stand up and stand out"! Fatoumata Ba counsels women in the workplace. She adds that ”Performance, Passion, People" are the three words she  lives by on a daily basis, as the bedrock of  her leadership style. 

A natural leader, she lead her teams to the most impressive sales event to date on the continent with up to 2.3 million visits in a single day and 25 times the magnitude of a normal day. “For me,  my greatest achievement is yet to come. Leading Jumia Nigeria is not a destination but a step towards something even bigger as Africa Internet Group is literally shaping the Internet experience on the continent..." She says


 Juliet Anammah urged fellow women to: “Show up. 90% of success is showing up. You’ll never have all the answers nor will you slay every dragon on your path but once you show up you’ll find that sometimes obstacles become the way.” 

 Mother of four children,  Anammah has had different struggles and attributes her greatest achievement as raising her children while her biggest challenge remains juggling between “priorities of work, family and [her] community”. An absolute proof, if need be, that this challenge can be overcome by the most willing.

 If the leading duo is impressive, it is not the sole example of women leaders at Africa Internet Group which champions gender parity across countries and ventures. Indeed, Jumia has one of the highest proportion of women leaders in Africa and globally, with a whopping 40% women managers, managing directors or CEOs.  Jeremy Doutte, CEO Jumia Africa commenting on this figure declared “At Jumia, we nurture one value: “Let the best ideas and people grow”. Diversity is not a goal for Jumia, neither is gender parity. Diversity and gender parity are a reality at Jumia Africa. This has been achieved by letting all talents blossom, and women have benefited from our equal opportunity environment. Jumia has extremely talented women at all levels of the organization, across all countries. Our companies in Kenya and in Nigeria are led and managed by women and they are doing fantastically well. We truly believe this is just the beginning”.

 The company has as such promoted various actions to empower women within its walls as well as throughout Nigerian communities. Jumia’s JForce Program is reaching out to disadvantaged women and giving them financial independence: the program now comprises 16,000 women, the majority of which are housewives and stay at home mothers. The program aims at empowering and enriching entrepreneurs-to-be with the full support of an established brand, giving the opportunity to mothers to contribute to the household earnings. Women now represent 34% of the JForce Program.

 Jumia also promotes small women entrepreneurs through its seller center: it offers them a distribution platform and thorough trainings which will help them grow their businesses.

 The e-commerce giant further  supports local women empowerment organizations such as Project Alert in Lagos and SheLeadsAfrica.

 Jumia has also committed to improving gender parity within its own walls by creating the Africa Internet Group Women Committee, led by managing director of Jumia Nigeria Fatoumata Ba. The committee is there to protect women against any form of harassment they could experiment in the workforce as well as provide career counseling and mentoring.

 On the business front, Jumia  is set to become an equivalent of Amazon on a continent with tremendous opportunities which will see its online population reach 50% by 2025 and its its smartphone owners rise to 360 million.

 On the business front, Jumia  is set to become Africa's equivalent of Amazon with potentials to grow  its online population up to  50% by 2025 and its smartphone owners rise to 360 million.

 Less than a week ago the company  secured a second investment of 225 million euros from Goldman Sachs and historical investors MTN and Rocket Internet. Earlier this month the company had announced a new investor, French insurer Axa which joined the group for an 8% stake and 75 million euros. Africa Internet Group, the umbrella company behind  Jumia, has thus become the first African Unicorn with a valuation of more than a 1 billion euros.

 Definitely  Africa's biggest, the internet and retail company is present in 11 countries in Africa, with Nigeria  where it all started as the flagship both in terms of market size and business performance which notched  135, 000 orders in one day during Black Friday 2015.