Kalnisha Singh wins two provincial Gender Mainstreaming Awards; is a finalist in national Positive Role Model award
Kalnisha Singh, founder and owner of business advisory company, KD Strategies (KDS), and director of Women Energy Connect (WE Connect), has won the provincial rounds of the Accenture-sponsored Positive Role Model award and the Inclusive Leader award in the 10th Gender Mainstreaming Awards.
Singh is a finalist for the national Positive Role Model award, announced on 6 October 2022.
The Africa-wide Gender Mainstreaming Awards are an initiative of Business Engage, an organisation driving strategic thinking on gender mainstreaming in the private sector.
Primary criteria for all of the categories of the Gender Mainstreaming Awards are: Ground-breaking ideas for driving gender mainstreaming; steadfastness in implementing them, and actionability of the ideas by a broader audience.
Singh began focussing on enabling diversity more than 20 years ago, basing her master’s research on her hands-on involvement in KwaZulu-Natal’s first woman-owned construction company that then became South Africa’s largest such company.
“Empowerment and transformation cannot be something we do while we’re busy making a profit,” Singh says. “They have to be the way we make a profit. They cannot be something we tack on to operations. They have to be our operations.
“The only way to achieve that is through inclusion at all levels – and gender diversity in particular. The tunnel vision that results from operating on only one type of talent, insight, or social and cultural perspective disables not just organisations but entire societies.”
Driven by this conviction, Singh has spent the past two decades managing transformation and integrated community projects with annual budgets of up to R120 million in the manufacturing, agriculture, mining, financial, and renewable energy sectors.
In all cases, Singh has proven the effectiveness of her distinctive inside-out, bottom-up methodology of converting the human and other assets that already exist within communities into economic opportunities.
Singh is also deeply committed to shaping the broader political landscape to enable transformation at every level of society, undertaking high-level research projects and audits for a range of government and academic organisations.
Most recently, she has operationalised WE Connect, a platform focused on increasing the inclusion of women and underrepresented genders in South Africa’s renewable energy sector. Of the sector’s 9 000 jobs, only 15% are filled by women.
Typically, Singh’s WE Connect involvement tackles one of South Africa’s most intractable problems – the decades-old energy crisis. “If the problem had been purely financial, it would have been resolved long ago. A real, lasting breakthrough is possible only by tapping into the innovation and progressive leadership that diversity enables.
“We cannot shy away from the simple fact that the greater the crisis, the greater the imperative for diversity and inclusion”.
