Meet CEO Whose First Job Was To Help Her Buy Underwear And Now Employs 2,800 Kenyans

A wise man once said it’s not where you are from but where you are going. And one woman who is well defined by this quote is Dr Jennifer Riria a well known name in the financial world having been awarded the 2014 entrepreneur of the year award by Ernst & Young.

“I am a visionary leader. I like to work with people because I believe that I can’t do it alone. I am committed, consistent and I have the Lord in me,” she recently told How We Made it in Africa

Her journey to the top wasn’t rosy at all. In an interview with the Financial Times, The Kenya Women Holding CEO talks of her humbling background where she had to walk 4km to school every day in bare feet and washed her one school dress every night and had to endure sleeping with goats and chickens under her bed.

“I fetched water, looked after the cows, chopped firewood, helped to cook and looked after the babies. That was my life,” she told the Financial Times. It’s also in the same interview where she reveals that she was an unwanted child.

“I say this with a lot of pain in my heart, but I was not a wanted child,” she says. “My father expected a boy.”

But despite having to start her journey at a disadvantage, Ms Irira relentlessly fought obstacles from right, left and centre to be who she is today.

She tells How We Made It in Africa about her first job when she was only 10 years old. “I worked in a neighbour’s kitchen garden removing weeds so that I could get some money to buy underwear,” she says adding that her first job out of university was teaching.

“Which I did for 10 years to the level of a senior lecturer at a local university, before joining the UN and later the Kenya Women Finance Trust (KWFT).”

Brought up in a poverty ridden homestead, Ms Riria says her mother is the one person who has inspired her career in the most momentous way.

“I came from a poor background. I watched my mother and other women in the village operate as donkeys. They would carry on their backs firewood, bananas, a bag of other stuff and a baby. I saw them get abused, beaten and work 24 hours a day and they did nothing.”

But that was not the kind of life that was meant for her

“When I qualified to go to high school my mother told me “don’t you ever allow a man to hit you and don’t ever stop because a man tells you to stop”. I have suffered for you and I have bore it for you. You will never go through anything I went through” and she repeated that over and over again until it stuck with me,” Ms Riria says.

Flash forward and she has managed to build a company that today employs 2,800 people. “When I joined, I was young, bold and fearless, on the edge of stupidity,” she confesses to the Financial Times reminiscing on her first days at the Kenya Women Finance Trust (KWFT)

“I was the loan officer; I was the accountant; I was the auditor; I was everything. But I knew what poverty means; I knew what hunger means; I knew these women,” she says.

Speaking about the part of her job that keeps her awake at night, she tells How We Made it Africa that it depends. At the beginning she says she used to be worried on whether she would get enough money to pay her staff, “Later in life it became how to grow the institution into an organisation that would outlast me.”

She also adds that her children keep her awake at night no matter how old they are. “As a parent you worry about your children no matter how old they are. My father is 95 and he still calls me to ask whether or not I have eaten.”

With retirement slowly beckoning she will focus on her foundation (Riria Foundation) and on writing.

Successful as she is today, her journey you will agree wasn’t all fun and easy and if you have a dream like she once did here is what she says “What are they (you) passionate about? What can you die for? That is the first thing they (you) should find out and go die for it.