As part of the SCAF knowledge series we proudly present the first episode of the Powering Development Podcast. In this podcast, we interview people in the renewable energy sector to share their first-hand experience, how they overcome challenges, and what potential the sector holds.
In the first episode, SCAF’s Alexander Kinnel interviews Roanne Albertyn (CFO Africa of VS Hydro) and Memory Mashingaidze (Co-Founder and Director of Tatanga Energy) about the challenges of developing projects in Zimbabwe and women in energy.
Both women worked together on the Great Zimbabwe Hydro project, which SCAF supported under its Support Line 2 co-financing legal cost and technical studies.
Listen here:
Recording in our media studio at Frankfurt School
Joining a developer and contractor and being on the side of asking for funds and not signing cheques was a learning curve, and in my view, a much harder play in the energy space. (Roanne Albertyn)
Memory and Roanne have a lot of experience in this still male dominated industry and are also sharing insights for women working in the energy sector.
Sometimes every job, assignment or connection may not seem important, but it is important to learn as much as you can from as many people as you can. Put your hand up to do things that are out of your comfort zone, make those connections, find your voice in the meeting regardless of your personality. (Memory Mashingaidze)
Roanne Albertyne, Alexander Kinnel and Memory Mashingaidze
What would you be interested in to learn about SCAF’s work or the work of our partners? Which subsectors and geographies are most relevant for your work and should therefore be covered? Are there certain areas during the development process that the knowledge series should address?
Alexander Kinnel: A very warm welcome to the first audio edition of SCAF’s knowledge management series. For those of you who don’t know the program, the Seed Capital Assistance Facility is a donor facility funded by the German and British government. The facility is implemented by Frankfurt School together with our colleagues at the UNEP in Paris. SCAF’s goal is to mobilize private sector funding by supporting the early stages of clean energy project development, with a geographical focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. As part of SCAF’s knowledge management strategy, the team will be conducting interviews with sector experts over the next month and talk about some of the challenges of operating in emerging markets. This will be the first interview of hopefully many to come.
So much for an introduction. But of course, I’m not alone here today, I have invited two of our existing SCAF partners to talk about a project they have been jointly working on and some of the challenges they were facing when developing the project. Therefore, joining me now in the conversation are Roanne from VS Hydro and Memory from our partner Tatanga Energy. Welcome!
It’s great to have you here for this conversation. Why don’t we start with a short round of introductions, let’s hear a little bit about what you’re doing in your day to day work on the companies you work for. Who wants to start? Maybe Roanne?
Roanne Albertyn: Thanks, Alex. It’s wonderful to be speaking with you today and sharing a little bit about what we’ve been up to. Thank you for inviting us to your first SCAF interview. I was reflecting recently that I’ve had the opportunity and pleasure to work with SCAF and its teams in various forms for about 12 years now. In my current position, as Head of Finance and Investments at VS Hydro, we’re delighted to partner with SCAF developing hydro projects of less than 25 megawatts in East and Southern Africa. We’ll dig a bit deeper into the particular one we’re discussing today later. But I can say SCAF played an important role in providing risk sharing in development with us. And we really appreciate that.
VS is a 50 year old company, originating from Sri Lanka. We were the first small IPP in that country. That was about 25 years ago. In 2007, the business made a decision to expand into the African market. At the moment, we are one of the leading integrated hydro players in Sub-Saharan Africa. My role at VS is to assist the technical team with the finance, legal compliance strategy and similar. With the projects and later integrating into the construction phase and operations. At the moment, we have about 250 megawatts of projects under development across six countries in East and Southern Africa. Then usually at any one time, we have about two to three sites under construction, either ours or those for other developers and owners. I’m into my seventh year at VS Hydro. And it’s a great, exciting position to have. And one of the great things is working with other developers like Memory.
Alexander Kinnel: Great. Thanks Roanne. Over to you, Memory.
Memory Mashingaidze: Thanks, Alex. I didn’t realize this was the first podcast. Thank you very much for inviting me and great to be on this podcast with Roanne, particular on a project that we’ve worked on for so long. But also just to give some thoughts in terms of how that project went.
I wear two hats. Firstly, because of my historical role on the hydropower project Great Zimbabwe Hydro, I still have an executive role on that project where I serve as executive director of the company. I’m sure we’ll be speaking a lot more about Great Zimbabwe Hydro today. So let me focus the next few minutes just on Tatanga Energy. Tatanga Energy is one of your newest SCAF investees. We’re a relatively new company. We were formed in 2018, we’re a Zimbabwean company focused on project development in the Southern African region. We have a pipeline of renewable energy projects, not as big as VS Hydro, but close. We have about 155 megawatts in development and some really groundbreaking projects that we’re working on. Most significant is our wind project, which will be one of the first wind power projects to be developed in Zimbabwe. We’re also starting to look outside of Zimbabwe and we have some early stage projects that we’re looking at in Zambia.
My day to day role is firstly to oversee the operations of Great Zimbabwe Hydro, but also to lead the renewable energy development of Tatanga Energy. And we’re really grateful to be supported by SCAF as Tatanga Energy as we start to develop some of our projects, both within Zim and within the region.
Alexander Kinnel: Thanks Memory. We’re also very glad to have you as partners. And of course, we will now talk about the Great Zim Hydro Project a little bit more. This particular project closing last year was one of the landmark transactions for SCAF. And probably for Zimbabwe as a country as well. Memory, you said, you’ve been involved for a very long time. Can you tell us a bit more about the project? I understand you’ve been working on the project for over a decade, is that correct?
Memory Mashingaidze: Yes, it’s over a decade. It took us 11 years to get to financial close. And one interesting thing I always try to mention is, I have a daughter who was born around the time we started Great Zimbabwe Hydro. Every year that came by her birthday would pass. And every year I think, we still haven’t got it to financial close. Last year was the first time that we celebrated her birthday, and we had reached financial close. So yeah, it has been a very long time.
But just a bit about the project. It’s a five megawatt hydropower project. It’s in a place called Masvingo, which is in the southeast of Zimbabwe. We named the project after the Great Zimbabwe Ruins, which are a few kilometers from the site. And if you know Zimbabwe, the country is actually named after the ruins. It was significant in that regard. We hope that this will be a leading project that the country would be proud of.
What’s unique about this project is that it’s the first project to be built adjacent to an inland dam. All the other projects that have been developed to date were all run-of-river projects. This was the first to be adjacent to the water authorities and was infrastructure. We started development of this project in October 2010 and finally signed our investment agreements just before midnight on the 31st of December 2021. The project was developed with several developers, I was one of the initial developers. So I’ve been with it since the get go. We partnered with VS Hydro and reached financial close with Frontier Energy, as well as Old Mutual and some of their pension funds. So that’s just a brief overview of the project.
Alexander Kinnel: I remember that the dam was built in the 1960s, right? And it was used for irrigation purposes.
Memory Mashingaidze: That’s right. Yes.
Alexander Kinnel: But why did it take so long for this particular project? Even when accounting for two years of COVID, that seems quite lengthy.
Memory Mashingaidze: It is. You just mentioned COVID, Alex, but it’s actually during the COVID period that we reached financial close. So just at the end of the peak of the COVID pandemic, we got to financial close. In some respects, we managed to progress quite a bit during that 2020 / 2021 period. So COVID had an impact for sure. But I think when I look back, the main reason is, we suffered from first mover disadvantage.
We were one of the very first IPPs to be licensed in Zimbabwe. There wasn’t a lot of precedent for IPP development, and it was all being done on a negotiated basis. But what also had an impact is what I mentioned earlier, that this is the first project to be built adjacent to an existing, publicly owned dam infrastructure. The water authority ZINWA didn’t have a precedent for how to relate to IPPs. For example, they didn’t have a concept of a non consumptive water use tariff. That’s something we had to develop with them. They had a consumptive tariff, but not a non consumptive water use one. We had land issues on the project and the title deed that they had for owning the land required that we have a presidential consent. That took a little bit of time to get. Also just the water use agreement itself is something they had never done. They had permits, but not a bankable agreement that investors could rely on.
We were developing all of that at a time when almost every other year there was change in management at ZINWA. For good two years, there was no board. We had to go to the Ministry of Lands to get our approval for our lease agreements. Also, a lot of the agreements like the power purchase agreement, the escrow agreement, connection agreement, they all had to be done on a negotiated basis. Getting even just the offtake agreements finalized took a little bit of time. And we were developing this project to be banked on a pure project finance basis. We had to make sure that we ticked all those financing requirements. Looking back, those are probably the main reasons why it took so long.
Alexander Kinnel: Yeah, that’s another chapter in the diaries of a developer, I guess. So then, how did Roanne and VS Hydro get involved?
Memory Mashingaidze: As I mentioned earlier, we were developing this and there were three developers in the beginning – a South African IPP, a South African DFI as well as myself. It was taking a long time, and the South African IPP decided to exit. The South African DFI decided that they weren’t going to fund the project until we had a technical partner on board. From about 2016 to 2018 I was plodding along with this project, trying to find a technical partner, and VS Hydro – well, I have worked with Roanne previously on other projects, and I knew that they were doing some projects in East Africa. So we made that connection, and from about 2018 onwards, VS Hydro came on board as a technical partner. And it’s really what the project needed. Because I didn’t have technical expertise. And although we had technical consultants, it’s quite different to have a partner with you alongside developing the project with you. VS Hydro brought significant support, as well as funding for the project.
My focus was then on the commercial side, getting the PPA Water Use Agreement and all these other project funding requirement agreements finalized on a commercial basis. VS Hydro came in with the much needed technical requirements. And between Roanne and myself, we looked at the financing side of the projects.
Alexander Kinnel: Now turning to Roanne, what can you tell us about the challenges you faced in your work? What are the main obstacles during the development of such a project?
Roanne Albertyn: I think I’d break it down into three parts. The first part is the technical side that we looked at. A lot of substantial work had been done on Great Zim Hydro, and it helped enormously in terms of what we had as a base feasibility. But the one aspect that we needed to dig deeper into was, in lack of a simpler way, how we were going to move the water from the dam to the powerhouse. There was an effective bend in the piping required. This is because the powerhouse had to be located on one side of the gauge given the land requirements. And that was quite a technical challenge both for VS internally, as well as for some external consultants from Europe we had brought in just to help us determine the best solution to move the water.
Also, the location of the powerhouse proved to be a kind of ongoing technical matter we had to address. It moved several times during the development process for different reasons. In fact, right up until early construction, we were still finalizing where the powerhouse was best located. That also impacted on some land leases required. And again, every time you’re moving, although the land is quite a small area, it might be owned by different government departments. So it took a bit of time to do that.
Then also, the next area that we struggled with was just how we were going to fund this project. I think early on Memory and us realized that traditional project finance wasn’t going to work as well on Great Zim Hydro. So we looked at how we were trying to solve this. The first thing we did was to break down the costing into local content and forex needed. This is because the access to forex during some of the development time was limited. We wanted to see what we could fund in the local market and what we had to fund from foreign currency. That was also a new aspect for us. We don’t normally cost projects net basis. It took us a while to really dig deep into the assumptions on that to try and be as accurate as possible. From there, we looked at how we’re going to fund it. We agreed that probably an all equity funding model would be the best, because we were unlikely to get the tenors we needed on the local market.
We were lucky enough to form interest from two investors, one local, and one foreign. Without the institutional knowledge that both had from working previously with VS and Memory, I don’t think we would have gotten their attention so early on when we joined, given the risk profile of the first project on a dam and the perceived country risk of Zimbabwe. We were able to talk with Old Mutual Zimbabwe and the Public Services Pension Fund, and then Frontier Energy of Denmark, both of whom added great value to the development processes along the way, and towards the end.
Roanne Albertyn: Then the third part was how we were going to contract the project, given the combination of local content and foreign content that we’d split early on. As a group of investors, we decided not to go with a traditional fully wrapped EPC. The project ended up with quite a few bespoke contracts on a contracting basis for local content or foreign content. It also took quite a lot of time to go through pricing it during the individual contract, breaking it down. I think overall, it was quite an innovative process, that we had to make up as we’re going along.
Alexander Kinnel: Absolutely, indeed. And I want to come back to the structuring side later on, but let’s now circle in more on the non-consumptive water license. Memory touched upon that already. Could you again explain what is meant by that and what it means for other small hydro projects in Zimbabwe?
Roanne Albertyn: On the one side, when we first looked at the project with Memory, a smallish project, and a single country, it wasn’t too exciting for any developer investor. We really wanted to look at replicability of this. And obviously, the non-consumptive water license was a good part of that, because there were other projects that could be rolled out in a similar basis, which is now starting to happen. Early on, VS identified other projects in Zimbabwe, some off dam and some run-of-river. But we decided to not develop too aggressively until we had a workable model that was working for us and that we had a track record in the country. We now have five projects at various stages of development in Zimbabwe and we are very pleased to partner with SCAF again on two of those. Hopefully not in the too distant future, we can have a more in depth discussion that it’s also reaching fruition. But I think the work that was done on the non-consumptive water license was really groundbreaking, because it’s much easier for us to replicate that on other dam sites.
Alexander Kinnel: Understood. Now that we’ve talked about the challenges of projects in Zimbabwe, I want to talk about that a bit more. You mentioned already a country’s specific risks. What were the effective measures you took to mitigate some of the risks? And furthermore, how important was it for the deal that, initially, no bank was involved, so that it was done on a full equity basis?
Roanne Albertyn: The one part is, you would think if you’re doing an all equity transaction, it might be faster, but it’s actually no faster because the project has to be as bankable for an investor as it does a lender. We still had to go through all those processes. That’s the one thing. The point Memory made about we needed a bank or project finance, it was effectively project finance with all equity. And the long tenors that you traditionally need for project finance bases were one of the challenges we had in the local market, the bank struggles with the tenors that we would require. There was interest from the banking community in Zimbabwe, they saw the benefit of power, but it was just the limitations on how long they could lend. That was one part, and also the deal size that would be required. That’s one of the reasons we looked at all equity.
This is the first investment for Frontier Energy in Zimbabwe. Whilst they are new to that country, they had a really good understanding of the risk profile. They spent a significant amount of time in the country scoring it themselves doing their own due diligence, understanding the frameworks, the risks, and I think if they weren’t such a adept investor in hydro, they might have struggled with it. Because they understand hydro, and then they explored the risks on Zimbabwe, they were able to match them together and see this would be a good investment for them to make.
Alexander Kinnel: The project also made use of a political risk insurance, right? And I know that parts of the project were financed in local currency. Could you explain why that was the case?
Roanne Albertyn: The local currency is a convert as of basis, in that it can adjust on the pricing. The principal risk insurance was a requirement from Frontier. It was provided by ATI and Old Mutual Zimbabwe. But interestingly, it’s a theme that we’re seeing throughout our projects now. At the time we felt as if it was more Zimbabwe specific. But more recently, we’re seeing all lenders seem to be requiring it. Even DFI lenders are looking for some sort of credit enhancement on the PPAs. The reasoning for it varies, the level of credit enhancement requirement varies, but certainly it’s a theme we’re seeing throughout our projects.
Alexander Kinnel: Then coming back to Memory, you spent quite a lot of time on the construction site recently. The project is under construction as we speak. When is it going to be commissioned?
Memory Mashingaidze: The new target date is November 30 of this year. Initially, it was July of this year. We are four months behind, but we are quite confident we should get to the 30 November deadline. We’ve had a couple of challenges. The rock excavation on site has been a really big issue. And I think Roanne alluded to it earlier that we had to move the powerhouse 150 meters downstream because of this rock excavation issue. This had lease implication issues as well. So that’s been one of the challenges.
Also, we had a hurricane in the area, hurricane Freddy, which brought significant rainfall into the area. Because it’s a dam, the dam started to spill. It was the first time in like 15 years that the dam has started to spill. But fingers crossed that the worst is over. I think we’re looking good at the moment. A lot of credit goes to our contractors and our various teams who are working really hard at the moment to pull back some time. We’re hoping that we’re on the final stretch now to COD in November.
Alexander Kinnel: Really good. One last question on Great Zim before we move on. I remember that presentation you gave in Zimbabwe, when we were on site, on the positive impact. Can you talk a bit about that? For me personally, it was really impressive. And I was fascinated to see 150 people living on site there.
Memory Mashingaidze: Yeah, Alex, I think the job creation is really one of those big impacts of infrastructure projects. It’s definitely been the case for this project. I know as a financial investor, it is one of those things you track, how many jobs did you create on the project. But when we broke ground, I remember standing on the dam wall, and I was looking down and you see the people, and you see what a difference it’s made. Especially for a country like Zimbabwe, where unemployment is really high, every job makes a big difference.
One example for us as a company was that we employed two ladies, one middle aged, and one a little bit elderly. This was the first real formal job that they got. It was the first time they were opening a bank account, we had to help them with that. They were getting health insurance. How they moved from being just a number to an actual individual person was really an eye opening moment for me. Without persevering as we had done, these people may not have had the jobs that they currently have. We have had about 350 people. Now, when you look at all our subcontractors that are working on the site, 95 % of those are all local Zimbabweans, and about 80 of those are from Masvingo, so within the project’s vicinity. We’re also employing about 23 women on site as well. That’s been a really big development impact on the project.
A few others that I can mention is, this project at Masvingo is 5 megawatts. But if you think of the geography of Zimbabwe, and its power generation, all the generation is on the western side of the country. There actually isn’t any generation in Masvingo, which is on the southeast side of the country. So even if it’s 5 megawatts, because of all the losses of having to generate from Hwange and Kariba, which are in the west, the actual impact on the province itself is quite significant. 5 megawatts is probably sufficient to cover all the residential needs of that area.
There’s obviously foreign direct investment from Frontier investments, as well as local investment from the pension funds. Also, we think we’ve convinced VS Hydro and Frontier to do a lot more projects in Zimbabwe. We hope that we will have a lot more hydropower development as a result of this project. But most importantly, since this is a podcast about women in the energy sector, I think this is probably one of two projects, definitely the first hydropower project to be developed and led by a female team. I’m very proud to be a female developer in the sector, and Roanne and I lead the development of this project. That’s something to really be proud of.
Alexander Kinnel: Thanks Memory for your explanation, but also for the perfect transition into the next topic. Enough now on the Great Zim Hydro. Let’s talk about, as you said, women in energy. I know that both of you have a background in finance. And I believe it’s fair to say that women are still underrepresented in the energy sector globally. What did encourage you to pursue a career in energy, maybe starting with Roanne?
Roanne Albertyn: That’s a very interesting question. In all honesty, my entry into the energy sector was somewhat accidental. It was through another woman working in the space and early a pioneer also in the investment professionals. She effectively opened my eyes to the emerging sector in South Africa at that time. That was nearly 15 years ago. At the time, I was more focused on the M&A in the corporate environment, such as recycling, and not power. But it was a good basis to transition from.
I’ve been lucky enough to join the first African continent based and owned private equity fund manager. Things have certainly moved on since then. It was a very big learning curve for me. I learned an enormous amount. Certainly at that stage, it was a male dominated environment, even in the fund I worked in. But my colleagues saw women as equals and encouraged us for growth and development. In that regard, I found a niche for myself on the investments outside of South Africa. Being Zimbabwean, I was really interested to see growth and new investments in East and Southern Africa. That’s where I focused my time in the fund.
I do recall those early days working in energy, and seeing very few women in the room, whether it was working with the bank or the investors or the companies looking to raise money, or the open forums and conferences, there were a lot less women. It’s encouragingly increased, which is great to see. There’s probably still some way to go, but certainly it’s a lot better than it was.
And then from there, I joined VS Hydro. After being on the financing side, it was again another learning, moving from signing checks to asking for funding and raising capital. It’s actually a much harder play, I think. On the development side, it takes longer. It requires a very different mindset. You need to see the world differently, that it’s not going to happen overnight. You don’t see the amount of transactions, you’ve got to stick with it. You’ve got to keep going back, asking and asking and asking, whether it’s for the PPA or for the funding. But we should be really proud of what we’ve achieved – individually and together.
Alexander Kinnel: Thank you, Roanne. And how about you, Memory? How did you get into energy?
Memory Mashingaidze: I think pretty similar to Roanne, actually. It’s not something I ever thought I’d do, going to school, it’s not something that was in my view in terms of a career path. But I started also on the investment side, I was focused on listed investments for a couple of years. When I left Zimbabwe to join IFC in the Johannesburg office, that’s where I found my home, so to say.
I was focused on infrastructure investments in Sub-Saharan Africa. For me, the impact that infrastructure investments have, both on the continent, in societies and just for people in general, is really what attracted me to infrastructure investments. Development impact for IFC is obviously a key criterion for investment. It has to make sense commercially, etc. I got really good training at the IFC on how to make sure projects are bankable, but also looking at the impact that these projects have. I stayed in the sector, I joined another institution in South Africa. The South African renewable energy program was just booming, then. There was a lot of exposure. I ended up heading the Energy Division at the Public Investment Corporation, and we invested in close to a gigawatt of projects.
It’s there that I started to see that, as developers, there’s a lot that you can do in actually developing these projects. After spending close to 14 years of my career on the financing side, I decided – through retrenchment, actually; I needed a bit of a kick to finally do it full time – that I needed to do something in Zimbabwe, which is my home country, and try and make an impact. As the years went by, what really kept me going was that I needed to prove to myself that it’s possible, right? That I, a relatively young black woman in the energy space with no real influential family connections, could make a difference to the infrastructure of my own country. For me, that was really, really important. And I think that’s what kept me going. Because if I hadn’t proved that to myself, it would have meant the exact opposite, that young black women cannot develop infrastructure projects. I needed to make sure that that happened, and that really kept me going for a long time.Having VS Hydro come on board has really made the project get to financial close and told me that it’s possible.
But obviously, Roanne and I didn’t do this on our own. There were men, but also a lot of women that helped us as we went along. And I just want to mention a few other women who really were supportive of the development of Great Zimbabwe Hydro. Without them and their support, the project may not have happened. First, I want to thank Dr. Gloria Magombo, she was the first the CEO of ZERA at the time when we started the project and is now the permanent secretary in the Energy Division. She gave me personally a lot of support. Obviously, we were taking a long time, there was pressure for us to do the project, but she kept encouraging me and us as a team that we should keep going. Others include Gwyneth Ngoma, Marjorie Mayida, Kumeshnie Naidoo, Princess Razaru, and also a dear friend of mine who unfortunately passed away, who did our ESIA, Ngoni Mandamba. All of these women in legal, financing, and environmental consulting helped us to get to where we are.
But most importantly, a big thank you to Roanne, who really came in at the right time. She understood what we were doing and was a true partner for me, during all those late nights, etc. Sometimes you do need another woman to speak to and Roanne definitely was there for this project. I just wanted to mention a few other women that have really contributed significantly to this project.
Alexander Kinnel: That’s great. Thank you, Memory. I realized now, I’ve invited the right two people to this podcast, obviously.
Is there any guidance or recommendation that you would want to give girls or young women starting their careers in energy and / or finance? I have a two-year-old daughter, and I would love to hear what you have in store for her.
Roanne Albertyn: I would say two things, the combination of technical and financial skills is needed when working in the energy space. I really had to skill up and beef up my technical side when I moved across. A combination of some engineering information is helpful along with the finance, and I didn’t have an engineering educational background. So that was a learning curve. I think early on I would encourage young women, if they see themselves going into the energy, to do a combination of technical and finance.
Then, do not be intimidated, be bold. Take on the challenges of new territories, new technologies and new strategies. Think about what can be done differently. Just because something’s being done that way everywhere else or up to now doesn’t mean it needs to stay like that. And, challenge the system. I have a small anecdote just myself where I’ve come across women in energy, and which probably might be interesting to share because it shows even internally how things have changed. Way back, when I first joined VS, we were doing a program with one of our lenders, on understanding the impact of women in HR and so on in our business. We came across that at one of our sites a woman was paid less than a man for doing exactly the same job. It was an institutional change that project level management had to understand. When I would say, well, why is that the case? The simple answer was ‘because the other person’s a man’. And that was a journey, I had to take a lot of my colleagues on. That it doesn’t matter, whatever the job is, you’re there for equality. If you’re not bold enough to take on the system, then we won’t see the change that we need to see.
The other part is to build relationships. Energy is a really long game. For the network one has from the early days in your education, your early part of your internships, into your permanent employment, all of those matter. It doesn’t matter who it’s with, but your relationships that you build over time really form what you can get done in the energy space.
Alexander Kinnel: That’s good advice. Memory?
Memory Mashingaidze: I think Roanne’s given some really good pointers. My advice is probably more general and generic. Looking at the energy space where I never thought I’d ever be, sometimes you don’t connect the dots very early on in your career. My advice is, for every job, every assignment, every connection, sometimes you don’t see the potential impact on your career early on, but take full advantage of it. Take full advantage of any assignment you’re given off of your network, as Roanne has mentioned, because some of the relationships only bear fruit much further down the line, and it’s like a revolving circle. I had worked with Roanne when I was at IFC, and it’s only much later on that we worked together again. A few other of my relationships are like that. So build on the networks. Don’t be too scared to put your hand up to do the extra work, find your voice in the meeting, and just really engage because sometimes you don’t know whether these big or small issues will have an impact on your career going forward.
Now more specifically to energy, we’re lucky to live in a country where women can have a role in infrastructure development. More globally, these opportunities are there for women. We’re fortunate in that regard. So take full advantage of them. If energy is really the space that you want to be, there’s always a way. I’ve been privileged to mentor a couple of women. Maybe something that’s worth doing is to find a mentor, either within your company or even outside your company, who can give you the advice that you specifically need for this sector. Having a mentor to guide you so that you don’t make those mistakes that some of us made as we went along the way, that’s something very beneficial.
So that’s what I’ll tell your two-year-old daughter, Alex.
Alexander Kinnel: Very well said, thank you so much. I will let her listen to this recording once she is able to understand it fully. Thank you. I think this concludes our interview. Thank you to Roanne and Memory for being available today. It was a very insightful conversation and I had a lot of fun. I hope the same is true for you as well.
Thank you to Manuel here in the studio for having us record everything. Thanks to the audience for listening, and I hope you will tune in to our next round of interviews. Take care and bye-bye.
