President and founding member of Yelenba-Women in Action
“Entrepreneurship starts with a passion, the rest is work, perseverance and vision.”
Aissata SIDIBE N’DIA is president and founding member of Yelenba-Women in Action, an NGO that works for the empowerment of women and the awareness of young girls in Ivory Coast. The creation of Yelenba is the result of a decision to support, through concrete actions, African women and girls in order to offer them opportunities to improve their daily life.
Since June 2020, she manages the Afrique Femme platform and produces and presents African Woman 2.0, a show that highlights women leaders of today and tomorrow who brave all challenges to accomplish their dreams, while keeping their African values.
Aissata holds an MBA from the University of Maryland in the United States and has over 18 years of experience in communications. From 2002, she spent 13 years at the IMF in various positions in the Communications Department. At the end of 2015, she moved to Abidjan, where she worked as a Communications Expert with the team responsible for the implementation of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) Ivory Coast Compact Programme.
In 2018, Aissata is Manager Communication West Africa at the African Entreprise Challenge Fund (AECF), a Nairobi-based development institution operating in agribusiness and renewable energy. This position has allowed her to expand her network in sub-Saharan Africa and to better understand the challenges of small private sector enterprises and the rural communities they support.
From 2012 to 2015, Aissata was a member of the IMF Staff Association, where she was elected President of the Association for two years in a row. These years of association life have given her a real desire to serve others and help them to achieve their potential. With this experience and an awareness of the difficult conditions that African women face on a daily basis, she decided to get involved in the field.