A Woman Executive in Nairobi to Bring Electricity to Rural Africa

Nicole Silvya Bouris has worked extensively abroad, specializing in the energy sector and ranging from positions at the World Bank, in Washington DC, to her current role in Nairobi, Kenya, committed to finding the best technology to electrify the rural or semi-rural areas throughout the continent (and beyond). “I want to point out that in Africa I don’t work as a volunteer. In fact, I have a good salary. I say this right away because there are people who think that some countries cannot afford to pay professional work. Young students often struggle to imagine satisfactory career alternatives to those in well-established and well-known sectors such as finance or luxury in Europe or the US. Instead, my personal story suggests that it is possible to imagine alternative career paths. It may well be that at the beginning of my current experience in Kenya I earned less than in Washington. But here I made a career, the career I wanted,” says Ms Bouris, Head of Business Development at Vida, a Geographic Information System (GIS) software house developing technologies for the energy sector.

“Of course, I moved from a work environment like that of the World Bank, with very strict codes of conduct, to a private business environment where clients are for instance heads of government who often come from patriarchal contexts. Being white and a woman is therefore not always easy but it helped me to know how to find the right balance between a professional approach and a more amicable one,” underlines the Bocconi graduate in International Economics and Management. “This is why I expressly advise female students who enter the workplace and find themselves in situations of gender discrimination to seek – in the best possible way – a direct exchange with anyone making arbitrary distinctions between men and women. It is not right, for us women, to justify gender disparity a priori. I happened to suffer from this form of discrimination during my assignment at a company, where there was a manager who often interrupted me and did not let me talk in meetings. I decided to take up the issue directly to him,” Ms Bouris points out. “In the end he apologized, he said he had not even realized it. So, whether it is voluntary behavior or not, it is always better to make your voice heard. Not even a cultural legacy can be an excuse. It is also true that the more international a work environment is, the greater the attention to diversity and inclusion.” 

However, Nicole Bouris’s career – whose mother is from Salerno, while her father is a Palestinian from Beirut, and she attended NATO schools in Naples – did not always follow a straight line. She began studying international law at Bocconi and then switched to economics, despite losing a year and having to take 15 exams in 12 months to avoid losing another year. “I felt discouraged sitting in the classroom next to younger students. I continued anyway. At the same time, I contributed to the launch of a partnership between Bocconi and the American University of Beirut, where I intended to spend my semester abroad for my English-language bachelor’s degree in economics. I participated in the creation of TEDxBocconiU and I was very involved in student associations, including B.lab, the largest student union on campus. Today I can say that I never had to send an application form for the jobs I found; I always got them thanks to networking,” recalls the Bocconi alumna who now leads a team dedicated to business development and who strongly believes in mentoring.

“My philosophy is that my manager in the company is also one of my mentors, because he or she has to believe in my potential,” she explains. “On the other hand, I myself try to act as a reference and also a source of inspiration for my mentees. There are presently no women on my team incidentally, but I don’t think I would be making any distinctions between men and women in my mentoring. Otherwise, I would be the one discriminating.”