Fatoumata Seydou Traore on leadership, active citizenship, and being vocal about female leadership
Mitti Ke rang always comes up with a topic that needs to be heard. It’s interesting yet engaging for everyone to learn from it. This time, we were in conversation with Fatoumata Seydou Traore from Mali.
She is an advocate of female leadership, something which definitely is the need of the hour. She encourages diversity, citizenship, and service to humanity. In this conversation, she talked about her journey so far, and her life experiences, which is indeed motivating.
Her desire for learning and serving is what pushes her forward. Lack of women's leadership in today’s world was a matter of concern for her.
She started working for a non-profit organization in Mali. The satisfaction she received from the smiles on the faces of the needy, pushed her ahead. Being a part of these causes is a great deal.
When you’re an advocate and to put forward your vision and explain your thoughts and ideas to bring in more and more attention you’re also subjected to a lot of negative criticism and poor responses was also a problem she faced. Her first instinct is to define the reality and the last thing is to say a word of gratitude. Her attitude is only to serve people.
Having said that, she also fights for a cause which is a deep-rooted problem. Objectification of women and violence against women. Not a lot of people raise their voices against this deep-rooted problem. She is totally against the idea that women are just heard to produce babies or take care of their homes or keep their needs behind. She aspires to show the world that women are just not that and there’s so much more which is left to discover and explore. This kind of confidence is what we’re lacking.
Moving forward in this conversation, she addressed the situation where there are a few women belonging to the rural who still think that their only motive is to take care of families and not realizing their true potential. Back in her own country women are not allowed to choose who they will get married to. The situation keeps getting worse. Her only advice to them is to have a strong sense of clarity of what they want and what they’re capable of achieving. It might be challenging at first but trying is what they have to do.
She has helped and impacted a lot of lives. Being an advocate, she had the ability to change someone’s life and show them what they’re capable of is a great achievement for her and this is what made her belief stronger. Going on, she also shared her personal experience where most of the time she worked with men. And all the time she faced the same issues, the same biased attitudes where women are not equal to men. She knew very well that she cannot take this behavior of the society anymore. She says that there are women who had it worse and she knew, now is the time to raise her voice.
She goes on to talk about Active citizenship and what does she mean by active citizenship.
According to her, someone who is recognized as a citizen of his/her country and who is contributing to the wellness of the country. Someone who actively participates in all the workings. Blaming the government for everything that goes wrong is never a solution. We are the government. We need to bring about change.
She goes on to talk about her education. She studied and did her masters in quantitative analytics and also studied economic policy. She’s happy to study economics and in the process of serving her country.
Her vision for herself and the country is to be someone who contributes to the building of the community and to bring positive and long-lasting changes. She aspires to be an inspiration to others. She is inspired by all those people who are working hard to create an impact.
Her advice to others who would want to join the same field as she is to always have clarity and never do or support the wrong things. She also talks about what she loves about her country Mali. She talks about the warm and welcoming nature of its people. For everyone who would want to connect and know more about her, she’s active on Facebook and LinkedIn.
She indeed is a person who knows what she wants to achieve and has completely devoted herself to empowering women and bring equality.
Contributed By- Karishmaa Kumar, Content Writer@ Mitti Ke Rang
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