Nolitha Fakude Isn't Asking for Seats at the Table - She's Redesigning the Room

As South Africa prepares to host the G20 and Cape Town readies for 400 of the world's most influential women leaders, IWFSA president Nolitha Fakude is reframing Ubuntu as a governance strategy, not a slogan — and insisting that the future of power, technology and capital will be written only when women and Africans shape the rules, not just join the conversation.

- 

Nolitha Fakude, IWF Cornerstone Conference Co-Chair IWF South Africa

Nolitha Fakude has spent a lifetime persuading powerful people that “human resources” is not a support function but the organising of any institution that hopes to survive the future. Long before she became president of the International Women's Forum South Africa (IWFSA), long before she chaired corporate boards and sat at the apex of extractive and financial industries, she was the young HR practitioner insisting that culture was not soft work — it was strategy.

“You can have the best balance sheet in the world, but if your people are not enabled to perform at their full potential, you are not unlocking the organisation's capability,” she says. It is not the language of corporate inspiration but of systems design. Fakude came into leadership through the door of conflict resolution, learning and engaging with labour, skills and people development and psychology. It shaped everything she does now, including how she wields power.

That vantage point is what she brings into this moment: a year in which South Africa hosts the G20, and IWFSA hosts more than 400 global women leaders in Cape Town for the Cornerstone Conference — an annual gathering that travels the world and lands on African soil just weeks before heads of state arrive. Fakude is not interested in the symbolism of it. She is interested in leverage.

“We are fortunate that our members are already influencing the B20 and the G20 workstreams,” she says, listing women who co-chair trade, fintech, manufacturing and labour policy task forces. “The real power is our ability to convene leaders who are already decision-makers in their own right. When you put that collective in one room, the agenda moves.”