For more than a decade, the FINITE Magazine Women Appreciation Awards has handed out trophies to women across Lesotho, celebrating their contributions to business, community and profession. But Ntsepeng Tsita Tikiso, the awards’ founding architect, has grown impatient with the optics of celebration alone.
“That criticism is valid when an awards programme begins and ends with presenting trophies,” she said flatly. “We have deliberately developed FWAA into a broader women’s economic empowerment platform.”
Her point cuts to the heart of a dilemma facing countries across Southern Africa: how to move beyond ceremonial gestures – the certificates, the galas, the commemorative speeches; toward something that alters the material conditions of women’s lives.
Botswana, which continues to grapple with the challenge of recognising and empowering women beyond traditional celebrations, may find instructive lessons in what FWAA has quietly built here in the mountain kingdom.
The awards were born in 2012 from a simple but unsettling observation. Women were building businesses, creating jobs, supporting families and strengthening communities; yet their stories rarely made it beyond the neighbourhoods where they lived and worked.
“As women, we saw many women doing extraordinary work but receiving very little recognition,” said Tikiso, who also serves as president of the BAM Group Foundation. “We felt that this had to change. Women and girls needed visible examples of what was possible, particularly examples drawn from their own communities.”
Over 13 editions, the programme has placed more than 1,000 nominees before the public and recognised upwards of 130 women across sectors as varied as agriculture, manufacturing, tourism, information and communications technology, education, health, security services, entrepreneurship and community development.
But Tikiso is the first to concede that visibility without opportunity is a limited victory.
“Women who were previously known only within their communities or sectors have been introduced to potential customers, partners and institutions,” she said. In other words, the trophy is a doorway; not the destination.
This year, FWAA is pushing that doorway wider, expanding beyond Lesotho’s borders for the first time. Regional participants include Botswana’s WeekendPost and YTV, as well as South Africa’s Vutivi Business News – not as spectators, but as active participants in programme discussions, entrepreneur engagement and the construction of a cross-border network designed to outlast the ceremony itself.
“These organisations are not coming merely to observe or report on the Awards,” Tikiso said. “They will contribute to programme discussions, engage with women entrepreneurs and leaders, and become part of a regional network that can continue beyond Women Appreciation Week.”
The logic is straightforward: a woman recognised in Maseru may find a distributor in Gaborone, a customer in Johannesburg, a mentor in Bloemfontein; if the channels exist to make those introductions. FWAA is attempting to build precisely those channels.
The broader Women Appreciation Week now encompasses business learning sessions, access-to-finance discussions, business-to-business engagements, exhibitions and networking with financial institutions, corporates, government and development partners. FINITE Magazine, Informative Newspaper, BAM TV and digital platforms extend the storytelling well beyond the awards night. The FINITE Lifestyle Club gives entrepreneurs a venue to promote their products, reach new customers and collaborate with other businesses.
Yet Tikiso speaks about these structural innovations with a kind of urgent realism rather than triumphalism; because she knows the barriers that remain are not the kind that a better awards ceremony can dissolve.
Many women still contend with limited capital, inadequate equipment, lack of access to formal markets, certification requirements, poor packaging, insufficient technology and thin business networks. Some are concentrated at the lower rungs of value chains — producing goods but exercising little control over processing, distribution, procurement or access to larger markets.
“Women are remarkably resourceful,” Tikiso said, “but resilience should never become an excuse for leaving structural barriers unresolved.”
It is a striking formulation – one that reframes the familiar praise of African women’s grit as a subtle indictment of the systems that make such grit necessary.
She sees potential in the African Continental Free Trade Area, the landmark agreement that could open continental markets to women-owned businesses. But potential, she warned, is not the same as access.
“We do not simply want to say, ‘This woman is doing excellent work,'” she said. “We want to ask, ‘Who can purchase from her, finance her, mentor her, distribute her products or help her enter another African market?'”
These challenges, she noted, are not Lesotho’s alone. They are shared; stubbornly, structurally; by women across Southern Africa, which is precisely why regional cooperation has moved from aspiration to necessity.
Credibility, too, has become a preoccupation. In a landscape where awards ceremonies are sometimes dismissed as popularity contests, FWAA has sought to distinguish public visibility from verified achievement.
The process begins with public nominations, but popularity alone does not determine the winners. Nominees are assessed on impact, leadership, innovation, consistency, contribution to their sectors or communities and the sustainability of their work. Judges are selected for their experience and professional standing; conflicts of interest are managed.
Tikiso acknowledged that the system is not yet perfect. “Credibility is essential because the award must retain meaning for the recipient, sponsors, partners and the wider public,” she said. As FWAA grows, she added, the judging process must grow with it.
What remains insufficient, in Tikiso’s view, is the broader ecosystem of support. Businesses, she argued, must move beyond one-off sponsorships and commemorative-season gestures toward sustained institutional commitment – creating procurement and distribution opportunities for women-owned enterprises. Financial institutions need to design products that respond to the actual needs of women entrepreneurs. Government must strengthen not just policies but implementation and market access.
“Women’s empowerment cannot depend mainly on once-off sponsorships or participation during commemorative occasions,” she said. “It requires sustained institutional commitment.”
As FWAA enters its next phase, Tikiso has begun to articulate a different metric of success; one measured not in the grandeur of the ceremony but in the arc of a woman’s trajectory after she leaves the stage.
“Our ambition is to build an ecosystem in which recognition leads to connection, connection leads to opportunity, and opportunity leads to trade and lasting economic transformation,” she said.
The organisation plans to increasingly track concrete outcomes: business growth, jobs created, contracts secured, finance accessed, partnerships formed, new markets entered.
“That is ultimately how FWAA should be judged,” Tikiso said, “not by how impressive the ceremony is, but by whether more women are visible, economically stronger, regionally connected and able to participate meaningfully in the African economy.”
For FWAA, then, the award is not the end of a woman’s journey. It is, if the ecosystem holds, a starting point; for greater visibility, stronger networks and economic opportunity that stretches well beyond the borders of any single country.