Valerie Traore — Talking Women’s Equality With A Woman Who Leads By Example
Women’s Equality Day was August 26, and it’s tough not to acknowledge the chasms between the male and female experience the world over. It’s a gap Valerie Traore — the founder of the West African advocacy and campaigns agency, Niyel — stares down often.
In March 2021 , she spoke to me in measured tones through the crackle of laptop speakers and transatlantic time zones.
If all had gone according to plan we would have spent the summer of 2020 embroiled in creative brainstorming sessions on the West African beaches of Senegal before hopping on a plane bound for Kenya — continuing the documentary we began filming in 2019.
Nearly two years, one pandemic, and tons of soul-searching lie between the last time we saw one another face to face; now, thousands of miles away and connected by two laptops, we dove deep into a topic that we’ve mulled over since meeting — identity, the space we hold as women, and how to eek ever closer to equality through bringing our full selves to the “table.”
As often happens with a photojournalist — a photo series stoked the embers of our conversation — so first, let’s drink in a memory.
It was August 2019. A few friends were lazing around Valerie’s apartment in Dakar, Senegal; late afternoon sun drenching her living room, the August air thick with moisture, South African wine flowing. We watched her slip into a black silk dress and secure a crown of gold beads atop her head.
Like school girls on prom night.
In this case the “prom” was an NBA gala (yep,the world renown National Basketball Association).
Val snagged an invite as the founder of Niyel, the West Africa-based international campaigns agency she started in 2008 as a way to leverage her uncanny talents for pinpointing communities in need of change -social, economic, public policy — mapping out a strategy, and following through with it. In doing so she created something that, in 2008, was a rarity on the African continent — a homegrown advocacy and campaigns agency that consistently goes toe-to- toe with the world’s biggest consulting firms, as Val says, “to develop strategies, to be contextually relevant, to be impactful, to be efficient, and to do it very consciously with the benefit and the human rights of our [African] people and all people in mind.”
In short, she catalyzes forward momentum through concrete means such as infrastructure and policy.
That muggy August evening I snapped away, imprinting the night on an SD card to share with her later — a bit of glamorous fun after countless cross-continental flights and long days filming our documentary in Kenya, Uganda, and Senegal.
Shutter. Click.
Stolen moments of Val taking it all in, giggling as she shook her beaded headdress, red lips framing a brilliant smile, sashaying through a doorway, wine glass casually cradled in her fingers. To me, these images have always been serene and beautiful. Intimate.
Unless you follow advocacy and public affairs on the African continent, the last few paragraphs are probably your first introduction to Valerie Traore, so you only know that she has a glamorous side, enjoys wine, and started a company with some lofty bottom lines.
As she would say,” You don’t know what you don’t know.”
Like how in the 13 years since its founding, Niyel has been at the forefront of seminal initiatives on the African continent that span food security, clean water management, and a myriad of political campaigns; placing Valerie on countless boards where she’s gained the ear of powerful politicians and garnered the trust of some of the world’s biggest foundations.
Val’s appetite for understanding and creating change is as voracious as it is insatiable — “I want to understand” often dripping from her lips.
When I met Valerie she was working to streamline FSM programs (fecal sludge management system) in Francophone West Africa to ensure governments in the region invested in better management of poop. According to Niyel’s website, the campaign — running from October 2017 to September 2020 — reached over 30 million people through national radio, television, and print media. The reach contributed to a reduction in illegal fecal dumping sites in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and kickstarted the development of sanitation strategy in Valerie’s birth country of Burkina Faso along with Côte d’Ivoire, and Senegal.
During the first Covid-19 lockdown of 2020 — a time when lots of us wanted to recall our fancier selves — Val posted a flirty yet demure photo from our August 2019 series to her personal Instagram account; and she received swift backlash — mostly from male peers.
“Your company is growing, and you shouldn’t be behaving like this” quipped a male friend.
Although criticism by way of social media isn’t earth shattering stuff, chastening a grown woman for drinking a glass of wine in a dress is the kind of rhetoric that sets women backward as we claw our way through a dog-eat-dog fight between the double standards of “acceptable” and “authentic” presentation.
Some of us — including me — are apt to take personal criticism to heart, and thus take leave of the proverbial table, but Valerie clapped back by penning “Don’t Be Yourself”, an op-ed cataloguing the “do’s and don’ts” imposed on her over the years. These criticisms aren’t about her experience, intelligence, or how she runs her business. The focus is narrowly on how a woman “should” look and act.
The quiver of a patriarchy amidst its’ reckoning.
Her op-ed became a foundation of InServiceOf.org — a catalogue of Val’s interests, concerns, musings and a time capsule where the many facets of her identity bear equal weight.
“ There are just so many things that define me — it’s complex,” she says. A long pause before she rattles off assets, tangible and abstract.
“African woman, Black woman, Burkinabé woman — , a person of faith, a creative, intelligent, happy, woman. I identify as somebody who’s joyful and who loves people.”
“In Service Of” is home to blog posts about “Karens” moving to Africa, the indescribable comfort in a hug from a young stranger, the addicting “Make We Talk” — her no-topic-off-limits podcast featuring prominent African voices — and of course, all things Niyel. Boundary lines don’t exist between the personal and professional here.
When I first poured over “In Service Of” in the summer of 2020, her fury and candor cut to my bones.
Just a year earlier Valerie hired me to be the creative for her documentary — and that changed my life.
We took some big chances on each other.
Mine were semantic — quitting a stable job in California as Yelp’s in-house cinematographer to move to Senegal for a few months. A move which basically boiled down to a 3-month surf vacation with creative autonomy sprinkled in.
For her, the stakes were way higher and her gambles were of the heart. She was hiring a stranger — who had never been to the African Continent — to film a documentary about issues and figureheads that are doing insurmountable work on the continent she has called home for much of her life.
Could this white chick from California have even a sliver of the love and reverence for Africa that she does? Moreover, how would it all translate on film?
And still, she put a tidal wave of confidence in me and my skills to pull off a scrappy documentary.
When I overturned the whole concept of the film from static interviews to field interviews — requiring a much larger role for Val — she breathed deep, and said, “OK.” When I stood ground on hiring local crew, including sound mixers — an often overlooked but key part of documentary filmmaking — she found the money to pay their rate.
Her confidence cemented my own and woke up something that had lain dormant — my voice. During my time with her I started taking photos and writing about them, dreaming up stories, choosing people and topics to amplify. Her leadership taught me to be firm but amorphous — changing as I learned new information. Adapting, stepping back, understanding — but to do it with every part of my physical and intellectual self.
Her mantra “I want to understand,” became mine too.
Not everyone gets to excavate the layers of their being under the tutelage of a “Val” but maybe someone who was in my shoes of two years ago will read about Val and realize that she doesn’t need to shut away parts of herself to be impactful and respected in professional spheres. She can dress up, sip wine, giggle, and create systemic change.
So, there Val and I found ourselves (notably on March 8 — International Women’s Day) sharing space despite being continents and oceans apart, my mentor and confidant still doling out lessons.
“I know we all walk around with our filters,” she remarks.
“I am not above having biases — I know I do -… [but] everything I have been taught about character, about growth, about interaction has come from other people — from just being in the space of other people. People are complex and we all carry, like I said, our own biases, but also our own journeys and our own hurts, and all the things that make us ‘us’ are so complex.”
Drawing from the power that lies in inviting a woman and all of her “complexities, experiences, and nuance” to the table, Valerie stresses:
“It is not unknown the extent to which businesses grow, the extent to which diplomacy happens better, the extent to which management is done in a better way in many sectors [when women are part of the conversation].”
It’s been one hell of a year, but those of us forging careers are re-evaluating our lives from “before Covid-19” to the present and we get a once-in-a-lifetime chance to decide who we want to show up as going forward. To do what Valerie has been doing all along.
“The way I walk into those spaces influences the spaces that will be created for other people to walk in, or will influence the way that other people will see the next woman [who] will walk into that space.”
“I walk into a space knowing that I belong and I will not take any disrespect to my presence here. I have earned my space. But I will do it with my full self. I will do it with my bald self, with my blonde hair self, I will do it with my tall self, I will do it with my experienced self. It’s all of me walking into that space. No part of me’s being left outside.”
We sat in silence. Still connected by the spindles of a wireless connection, static pulsating softly in the air, and for me — the tightly wound threads of a status quo begin to unravel
Today, many female identifying individuals still keep pieces of themselves under lock and key — whether it be for physical safety or fear of a less violent but personally devastating retaliation. It’s really brave to be all of yourself and in the afterglow of this Women’s Equality Day, I’m looking forward to when it’s no longer brave but just..is.
