Beyond representation: Why women's leadership in South Africa needs more than a seat at the table
- ORIBI Village
- 4 hours ago
- 5 min read
This Women's Month, ORIBI's Katlego Mohuba argues that real progress for women isn't about being in the room. It's about who gets to make the decisions once they're there.
Every August, South Africa pauses to remember the women who came before. It's a tradition rooted in something specific: the courage of the more than 20,000 women who marched to the Union Buildings on 9 August 1956, standing against the machinery of apartheid and demanding to be heard.
That march wasn't a symbolic gesture. It was collective action with teeth, led largely by women whose names history never bothered to record. And it's a reminder that the freedoms and opportunities women hold today weren't handed down. They were fought for, inch by inch, often by people who never lived to see the outcome.
So what does that legacy demand of us now?
For Katlego Mohuba, Programme Lead at ORIBI, the question isn't rhetorical. It shapes how she thinks about her work every day across development finance, civil society programming, research and higher education.
"Remembering the sacrifice of those brave women in history raises a question about the present," she says. "What should meaningful progress for women look like now?"
Mohuba is quick to point out that women today are visible in spaces that once excluded them outright such as in classrooms, boardrooms, parliaments or executive teams. That visibility matters. But she's more interested in what happens after the door opens.
"We also must ask what happens once women are in the room," she says. "Do they have meaningful decision-making authority? Do they have access to resources? Can they influence how those resources are allocated? And are they supported to exercise judgement, lead and grow?"
It's a distinction that cuts to the heart of the gender equality conversation in South Africa: representation without authority is just a photograph. Real transformation happens in the harder, less visible terrain of decision-making power who controls budgets, who shapes strategy, who gets trusted to fail and try again.
Inside ORIBI's work with civil society organisations
Mohuba currently leads the rollout of a national programme strengthening civil society organisations across four South African provinces, working through locally rooted implementing partners.
The model combines organisational diagnostics and ecosystem mapping with social entrepreneurship training, incubation support, grant funding, and notably experiential and game-based learning methods that break from the standard workshop format.
For Mohuba, none of these are standalone interventions. The real value lies in how they interlock.
"Training alone is not always enough, and neither is funding," she explains. "An organisation can have an extraordinary idea and deep knowledge of its community but still need stronger systems, networks, access to finance, mentorship or opportunities to test and refine its model. I am interested in how we bring those different pieces together in a way that builds capability beyond the life of a programme."
That last phrase, beyond the life of a programme, is doing a lot of work. It's a quiet critique of development funding that disappears the moment the grant cycle ends, leaving organisations no more resilient than when they started.
Who controls the resources, and why it matters
Mohuba's focus isn't only on whether funding reaches organisations, but on how that funding is structured: who has access to it, who decides where it goes, and what it's ultimately allowed to build.
These aren't abstract, back-office questions. They determine who gets to participate meaningfully in South Africa's economic and social development and who gets left managing scarcity instead of building something sustainable.
It's why ORIBI's programme leans into social entrepreneurship and incubation alongside grant-making. The goal is to help civil society organisations build financial sustainability without losing the social purpose that drives them in the first place.
Learning methodology plays into this too. Mohuba is a believer in experiential and game-based approaches precisely because information transfer isn't the same as capability.
"A workshop can transfer information, but building capability takes application, reflection, experimentation and support over time," she says. "I think we have to remain curious about how people learn and how organisations develop."
The classroom and the field aren't separate worlds
Alongside her development work, Mohuba teaches across economics, finance, business and research. She doesn't treat academia and practice as two separate careers running in parallel for her, they inform each other constantly.
The classroom is where theory, evidence and economic reasoning get interrogated on their own terms. Programme implementation is where those same ideas collide with institutions, incentives, human relationships and the unglamorous work of getting things done. Move between the two long enough, she says, and a common thread emerges: building the capability that lets people make informed decisions and exercise real agency over their own lives.
It's this lens, capability over charity, agency over assistance, that shapes how Mohuba thinks about women's economic empowerment specifically.
Redefining what economic empowerment means
For Mohuba, empowering women can't simply mean inserting them into systems that were never built with them in mind. It has to mean something bigger: women building their own organisations and enterprises, controlling resources rather than just receiving them, producing knowledge, sitting inside economic decision-making, and shaping the institutions around them.
"Women should not have to be extraordinary simply to access ordinary opportunities," she says.
It's a line worth sitting with. So much of the public narrative around women's success leans on stories of resilience women who overcame, who persevered, who beat the odds. Those stories are real and they deserve to be told. But Mohuba is pushing for something less romantic and more structural: environments where women don't have to clear extraordinary hurdles just to do ordinary work.
That also means letting go of the idea that there's one correct way for a woman to lead.
Women need room to develop their own judgement, question how things have always been done, make calls that are genuinely theirs to make, learn from getting it wrong, and build a leadership style that's authentically their own without having to perform a particular brand of strength, resilience or warmth just to be taken seriously.
Mohuba's own understanding of leadership is still evolving, and she's candid about that.
"I am learning that leadership does not mean having certainty all the time or having every answer," she says. "Sometimes it means being able to sit with complexity, ask better questions, listen to the people closest to the work, make decisions when they are yours to make, and remain accountable for them."
Looking back to look forward
When Mohuba reflects on the women of 1956, she doesn't just see victims of an oppressive system she sees women who exercised real agency inside brutally restrictive circumstances. They organised. They challenged the systems in front of them. They acted together to widen what was possible for the generations behind them.
Seventy years on, the landscape looks different, but the underlying responsibility hasn't changed: keep expanding what's possible.
That means the next chapter of women's development in South Africa has to be about more than visibility. It has to include real access to education, finance, networks, ownership and leadership roles backed by institutions strong enough to let women actually exercise authority once they're inside them.
Across everything Mohuba works on development finance, programme delivery, research, teaching - one question keeps resurfacing: are people and organisations genuinely better equipped to shape what happens next?
Maybe that's the right question for Women's Month too.
Celebrating women matters. Marking how far South Africa has come matters. Representation matters. But the deeper measure of progress is whether the country is building institutions, organisations and communities where women hold not just visibility, but the capability, resources, authority and freedom to shape their own futures and the systems around them.
This Women's Month, follow ORIBI for more stories on the women shaping South Africa's development sector and what real progress looks like once they're in the room.
