Quick facts:

• Remote site service provider

• Main countries of operation: Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Central African Republic, Mozambique and Libya

• Headquartered in Dubai, UAE, with a regional office in Nairobi, Kenya

• Publicly listed on AIM of London Stock Exchange since 2018

• 1500 + employees

• Female CEO and female Chair - 29% of Board members are women
  

What is driving your company’s ambition to advance gender equality?

Having a female CEO and Founder as well as a female Chair in a male dominated industry means that gender has always featured high on RA’s agenda. We are an equal opportunities employer. However, in many of our countries of operation, women have less access to education and formal sector employment, and it can hence be harder to find qualified female candidates for the positions we hire for. As such, we recognized the problem as a material issue for RA to create programs specifically designed to include more women at all levels of our workforce.

What is one concrete action your company is taking to reach your target and help move the needle on women’s representation and leadership?

• We proactively target and encourage female applicants through our social media platforms and posters hung at relevant partners’ facilities.
• We invest in identifying barriers that prevent more women from joining our workforce. As these barriers vary from country to country, each country team has country - specific action plans for how to overcome the challenges.
• We recognized the need to encourage the proportion of female applicants for professional roles and as such, invested in increasing our female follower base on LinkedIn to 25% in 2020, up from 16% in 2019.

What is one lesson or pitfall to avoid that other companies could learn from?

Wherever hiring more women has cost implications, it’s important to identify and incorporate these into project budgets from the very beginning. For instance, we provide our remote female staff with separate accommodation and ablution facilities, which sometimes comes at an additional cost. If this additional cost is not written into budgets from the very beginning of a project life cycle, it can cause delays and challenges down the line.

To learn more about RA International’s sustainability strategy, please visit https://rainternationalservices.com/sustainability/