As in the past, this year’s TOP 40 finalists were picked on the basis of well-known parameters we have only come to sharpen and perfect over the nine years we have paraded Kenya’s outstanding women.
So in this list are entrepreneurs, corporate high-fliers, law, finance and medical professionals, sportswomen, and philanthropists.
In picking this year’s TOP 40 women, the Business Daily has stayed with the goal of making it more than a list of the best known, most prominent or most influential women in Kenya today.
Picking 40 Top Kenyan women from the hundreds of entries that get submitted every year has never been easy. Doing the job in the middle of intense, and noisy political campaigns, made this year’s task even harder.
For reasons that no one could possibly explain, the entries were slow in coming, and most were last minute — a well-known Kenyan habit.
Politics, which has dominated public discourse in the country for a couple of years, has certainly impacted on activity in all spheres of the economy — making it difficult for the thousands of brilliant and ambitious women out there to show talent, leadership and prowess in their fields of choice. In other words mobility has been significantly slowed down during this period — and as the saying goes —when the going gets tough, the tough get going.
As in the past, this year’s TOP 40 finalists were picked on the basis of well-known parameters we have only come to sharpen and perfect over the nine years we have paraded Kenya’s outstanding women. So in this list are entrepreneurs, corporate high-fliers, law, finance and medical professionals, sportswomen, and philanthropists.
In picking this year’s TOP 40 women, the Business Daily has stayed with the goal of making it more than a list of the best known, most prominent or most influential women in Kenya today. We have instead underpinned our choices on the candidates’ ingenuity, freshness, performance and durability in their fields of excellence.
We have then ascertained each candidate’s age, and interrogated as far as possible, data on the size of the enterprises they have founded, companies they work for (turnover or number of employees), the scope and complexity of what they do and the competitive landscape in each segment of the economy.
Women running or occupying senior positions in companies with a multi-national reach still scored higher marks than those in charge of national/local agencies.
In this list are also women professionals such as lawyers, architects, and partners in accounting firms, included purely on the basis of the size (value) of the work they have done.
The Top 40 Under 40 list has also awarded high marks to women who have excelled in professions that have been and remain male dominated such as software engineering, actuarial science, aviation and engineering. This is because we believe there should be no gender-based glass ceiling on any career aspiration.
Ochieng’ Rapuro, Editor
PAYE Tax Calculator
Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
