Our Project.
Mentoring
Mentorship enhances one’s professional journey greatly
In Africa, there seems to be an absence of a long-standing culture of mentorship. However, the combination of informal and formal components of mentorship relations is fundamentally essential, especially for those who wish to progress in their own career ambitions. The presence of a mentor, if efficiently executed, could enhance one’s professional journey greatly.
Through our mentorship class, we understood that women who do not receive mentorship are most critical demographically. Many, who have been able to receive mentorship, still tend to complain that their mentors serve as a burden than an asset. When a woman’s mentor is a male, problem is usually associated with a camouflage of expectations where he is expectant of certain social benefits in exchange for his professional generosity. Such misunderstanding may create a sense of unwarranted social reciprocity and lead to unhealthy mentorship relations for the woman.
Even with a female mentor, the expectations are not always aligned with the goals and expectation of the mentee. Various societal characteristics tend to yield an environment of competition between the female mentor and her mentee both socially and professionally.
There are various positive resolutions for these types of challenges that ICONs have found to be most constructive and accommodating for female mentee, as we seek to bring professionals to share mentorship practices among one another and to discuss techniques that are most conductive to the career advancement for our mentee. This mentorship class is not only advancing the quality of mentoring in our community but to increase the presence of these relations in general.