Hello

I literally fell into my first career. I was never sure what I wanted to do, but halfway through university, I was enamoured by the ‘glamour’ of management consulting through business books I was reading. The first opportunity I had to join the industry was with a boutique environmental consultancy firm. I knew nothing about the environment part of this, but it was consulting, so I gave it a go. I was young, waiting on my mandatory youth service, and took the job without pay during my three month wait.

My very first task there was to prepare and give a presentation about the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and it was pretty interesting! After my mandatory service, I joined the firm full time. In my ~4 years there, I learned so much about the impact (positive and negative) projects have on communities and environments, about working with government bodies, and about project managing different teams and experts.

But I did take up an opportunity and defected to a ‘darker’ side of business; I was now fully immersed in the management consulting of my dreams. It was a wild run…very busy…but full of learning. There I learned about developing business strategies (answering what, who, where, why and how) and project managing complex programs. It was also at this time that I discovered I liked African art and design quite a bit, so I took up blogging about this on the side. It kept me sane in the whirlwind of a Big4 career.

Despite my growth, and even though I was working largely with government, I was missing having a direct connection between my work and social & environmental progress. After ~3 years, I decided to take a year off for an MBA, and to recoup. It was during this time that I realized that both my environmental consulting and management consulting experiences could be merged…I didn’t have to help businesses just maximize profit and minimize cost; I could also help them create value for customers and shareholders while being a force for good to other stakeholders around them.

Since then, I’ve gone back to consulting, but executed and led a myriad of strategy and sustainability projects with governments, NGOs, banks, insurance companies, FMCG companies, and telcos. I’ve found myself deepening both my strategy and sustainability expertise in the financial sector - a sector that is instrumental, if not pivotal, to the journey towards sustainable development. I’ve gone even deeper into finance to specialize specifically in Payments - a sector that literally makes the world go round.

I hope to continue doing this forever - working with organizations in Payments (banks, FinTech, mobile money operators, retailers, small businesses) to create value for themselves and every stakeholder around them too.

And while I do this, I’m using my African art blog called Muse Origins as a personal platform to impact my own environment and community.

Thanks for being here

Adiya

P.S I currently work for a global payments and technology company, but all essays and stories on this blog are my opinions and views, and in no way reflective of the views of my employer!