This week, in the second article launching our new Limitless series on young African women who are changing the game in male-dominated industries, we shift our focus to Ndeye Diarra Diobaye, a 27-year-old communications executive who is taking a whole new approach to guiding corporate and institutional clients to the right decision.
With her transcultural Senegalese-Malian-French heritage, Ndeye Diarra Diobaye makes it her mission to remain creative, informed, and focused on results for her clients.
As the Associate Director of Euros / Agency Africa, she is based in Casablanca, but her job requires her to be constantly moving around business and policy centers in different parts of Africa. She is engaged in a variety of subject matters, and her client’s issues are her priorities, but she says that her long-term endeavor is to contribute to Africa’s active ownership of its narratives. And she is doing it with women’s empowerment in mind.
As the disruption in the communications business continues to blur the lines between different forms of public messaging, Ndeye is responsible for developing the agency’s business from the ground up and tailoring a new offer for strategic communications and public affairs consulting for African and African-based private and public sector organizations. A graduate of Sciences Po Paris and the London School of Economics, she supports the agency’s clients in engaging with their stakeholders through media, digital communications and events. She also works to strengthen her clients’ relations to governments.
As a young journalist, Ndeye learnt the demands of navigating change and turmoil at media companies Le Monde and The New York Times (and TRUE Africa). Now, she is establishing herself as a PR professional who can be counted on to identify centers of influence in different regions of a vast continent. Her secret sauce seems to be a relentless dedication to her clients’ image supported by the implementation of many different kinds of online and on-the-ground campaign activations.
When in #Lomé
. pic.twitter.com/g54vdCTetG — Ndeye Diarra Diobaye (@NdeyeDD) May 24, 2021
Previously, she worked in Abidjan as a consultant to the African Development Bank. Having lived in Brazzaville, Dakar, and other African capitals, she has learnt to deal with unwanted attention. She says that she deals with men in the workplace in different ways, depending on where she finds herself.
In reflecting on her job today, she says that what she loves is the constant challenge of trying out new ideas. “As cliché as it sounds, there isn’t a day that looks the same and that’s one of the aspects of my job that I cherish the most. The company is just a year old but our business is thriving and our team is growing so I get to do about a 1,000 things each day, including supervising accounts, acquiring new ones, and managing the administrative side of things. It’s a privilege to be able to be exposed to so many aspects of this business and to try to bring something new to the market.”
With thanks to Africa No Filter who made this series possible.