Kenyan executive strives to make a “deliberate” difference in gender equality

When Martin Ochien’g started at Sasini PLC, where he is now Group Managing Director, he visited one of the Kenyan company’s many tea factories.

Looking around at the factory’s roughly 200 workers, he saw no women and asked the manager to explain.

“He said to me, ‘Well, we shy away from employing ladies in the factory … We make food, we produce tea, and we’re just not sure it's the right place for ladies.’”

The manager then made a joke “that their hair could go in the tea and that’s not hygienic,” Ochien’g recalled.

“I lost it,” he said in an interview with the UN Global Compact. “I decided we’ve got to drive a difference here.”

The company executive spoke with the Global Compact ahead of Target Gender Equality LIVE on 15 March, part of the initiative aimed at supporting companies to set ambitious targets for women’s representation and leadership and address barriers to achieving gender balance in business.

Three years after the incident at the tea factory, Ochien’g says women fill the ranks of leadership - as group heads of procurement, in information technology, as factory managers and field directors - at Sasini, a huge East African company that grows, produces, markets and exports tea, coffee, avocado and macadamia nuts.

“Especially in the African continent, there’s still a mindset that the male individual is better at aspects of life and society than the female individual,” he said. “It’s propagated by highly educated individuals who are in leadership positions, informed mainly by their background, societies they come from, the cultures they belong to, in some cases the religion they profess as well. 

“So what I always say to people is if you want to correct these inequities from the past, you’ve got to drive what you want to achieve deliberately.”

Gender equality is embedded in sustainability, he added, and sustainability is critical to Sasini’s business.

In agriculture, “without sustainability, you just can’t work. You can’t have a business to run,” he said.

The company, a UN Global Compact Signatory since 2015, utilizes the blueprint laid out by the Global Compact in its commitment to four key areas - human rights, good labour practices, protection of the environment and anti-corruption practices. “We are setting goals,” he said. “That is really working for us.”

Sasini shares its strategies and success stories through platforms of the Global Compact, he said.

“Whenever we can tell a story that we are proud of, we want to tell that,” he said. “We are very happy to share where our successes are coming from.”

While 40 percent of the company’s top leadership is now female, he said, much is left to be done throughout the organization.

“Equity is something you don't achieve until it's all the way down the organization,” he said. “The only way I’ve found to do that is to have these goals set at every level of the organization so it just flows down to the ground.”

For example, he said, the industry has been dogged by the notion that women work in the field and the other jobs go to men. Sasini addressed that misconception when it started automating its tea harvesting in 2019, he said, and now 60 percent of the machine operators are female.

“So there is progress,” he said. “Are we where we need to be? Not yet but there's been a lot of change since I joined.”

The company runs management training courses for new university graduates to join its team. In the workplace, it gives employees credit for on-the-job skills and experience and offers on-the job education options.

And Ochien’g says he keeps a close eye on hiring to make sure women are considered throughout the jobs pipeline. He credits his own background working outside of Kenya for a number of Western companies for building his commitment to sustainability and to gender equality.

“When you get back home,” he said, “you then find you can actually influence things and so, if you're strong about it, people follow you.”