Hanae is the founder of Douar Tech, a Moroccan nonprofit organization that promotes the economic independence of young people, especially women, from precarious backgrounds in rural areas, empowering them through training in innovative entrepreneurship and technology. Her areas of interest and expertise are at the intersection of technology, inclusion, entrepreneurship, and international development.
Philippine is a 21-year-old entrepreneur, founder of an award-wining EdTech company called NewSchool.
She is recognized by much French national media as being the youngest entrepreneur of France.
Philippine created her startup at the age of 15, while still studying at the lycée. While asked to create a pretend startup, the young teenager decided to go beyond the limits given and decided to make of NewSchool a real-life business in September 2014.
Only a few months later, Philippine won dozens of Education, Entrepreneurship and Innovation prizes.
NewSchool has since been acquired by another EdTech company in 2019. Philippine has been recognized as “The Most Innovative Woman of 2017” while still studying at the Lycée, as well as one of the “50 Most Influential Women in the World”, next to Malala and Michelle Obama.
Philippine has recently graduated from UCL London, gives conferences around the world and works on a new and exciting project.
Sixteen years ago, I created my own communications consulting agency after my training at Efap New York. I was 24 years old. For 9 years, I had the pleasure of working with brands and companies in the retail, cell phone, finance, airline, fashion and event industries in Gabon, Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Senegal before moving to Paris in 2012 where I have been working as a consultant with clients all over the world ever since.
These clients are students, employees, project leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, political figures and especially brands that want to build an image synonymous with success.
Gwennan is 17 years old and is in her first year of preparatory studies at Epita in Lyon. As a JFD and BECOMTECH ambassador, she participates in various meetings in her region to talk about gender inequalities and orientation, especially in the digital world. Dreaming of a career in the digital world, she notably had the opportunity to participate in a project during Codeweek Paris 2018, which taught the basics of code to novices for a morning. She also took part in the International Leadership Academy of the German association GIRLS GEARING UP (GGU) in Berlin, with young girls from all over the world to discover the basics of female leadership.
Josephine Ndeze Uwase, a winner of Miss Geek 2019, is a creative student in computer science in Goma, DRC, and ambitions to become a first-class engineer in artificial intelligence. She emerged as the winner of Miss Geek Africa 2019 thanks to her project to reduce maternal mortality rate, in the rural Congo, using cell-phone technologies. She aims to be a role-model for young African girls interested in science and technology and to bring her young energy to promoting science in the DRC. In 2019 she gained a degree in science at Institut Supérieur de l’Informatique et de Gestion, in Goma, DRC, and hopes to finish her Bachelor of Science degree at the same institution in 2021. She’s also the nef ambassador of DRC and the Co-founder of uptodate Developers startup.
Lucia Seel has more than 16 years of experience in international innovation and cluster policies and cluster development/management, having coordinated the European programmes at Clusterland Upper Austria Ltd. for 6 years when she played an active role in several flagship European projects like the European Cluster Excellence Initiative and The European Cluster Observatory. In 2011 Lucia started her own consultancy, focusing on the development and/or management of European projects, support for international cooperation in the field of innovation and clustering, cultural and creative industries, training and international networking. She was between 2012-2013 member of the high-level expert group “European Forum for Clusters in Emerging Industries” set up by the European Commission, DG Enterprise & Industry. Since 2019 she is Member of the European Cluster Expert Group of the European Commission (DG GROW).
Lucia was between 09/2015-06/2020 the Community and Content Manager of the European Cluster Collaboration Platform, an initiative of DG GROW and from 06/2020 she is the validation manager of the cluster actor profiles. Between 2016-2017 she was Community Manager of the Interreg Europe Policy Learning Platforms (Research & Innovation and SME competitiveness).
Lucia is a well-known speaker and moderator at international conferences and workshops, with a large record of presentations and moderations. In April 2012 she set up the Cluster Women European Network (ClusterWene), an entrepreneurial initiative to strengthen women’s position in the cluster community. Lucia is an evaluator of the EC in the COSME programme and certified ESCA Cluster Benchmarking Expert and Gold Label Assessor. She is Austrian, but Romanian born and speaks 6 languages.
As an active international person Lucia was founder and the first president of AIESEC in Romania and is now member of several large networks like TCI – The Competitiveness Institute Global Network, EWMD – European Women Management Development Network for which she acts since 11/2019 as National Representative for Austria in the International Board.
Lucia graduated magna cum laude from the Academy of Economic Sciences in Bucharest/Romania. She worked both for multinational companies such as Saatchi & Saatchi Centrade in Bucharest and Silhouette International in Linz/Austria (as area manager for South-East Asia and South Europe handling a sales budget of more than 30 Mio. Euro), as well as for small companies in Austria and public administration bodies in Austria and Romania.
Barbara Sessa is Senior Vice President, Head of Digital Consumer Product Europe at Mastercard, where she leads a team of 35 people.
Barbara has an extensive international experience and has been supporting banks, merchants and fintechs for several years in the development of their business (New Product launch, acquisition and customer commitments).
With over 15 years of experience in the payment industry, Barbara is an expert in digital transformation.
Before joining Mastercard, she held roles in Digital Marketing in the different retail and commercial banks
Women’s Advocate. She is deeply convinced that diversity stimulates thinking and creativity. Which is why, she is responsible for the EWLN Woman network at Mastercard France.
Her mission is to promote concrete projects that will have a positive impact for a more inclusive society, in particular with more women in finance and tech professions.
