We are pleased to announce that Laurence Janssens is short listed for the ICT Women of the Year by DataNews.
We include a short BIO of Laurence here and we hope you will also go out and vote (see button below) for her as member of Women on Board.
Laurence Janssens is Country Manager Southern Africa Microsoft Corporation
In April 2017, Laurence Janssens and her family moved from Brussels to Sub Sahara Africa, where she became Microsoft’s country manager for the Southern African region covering Angola, Botswana, Namibia and Zambia. She is part of the leadership team of Microsoft that manages 65 countries across Africa & the Levant region – from Southern Africa to Pakistan.
On a daily basis, Laurence and her local teams are supporting the digital transformation of key economic actors of Angola and Botswana in Mining, Oil and Gas, and Financial Services. It is a thrilling place to be as recent advances in areas of AI, mobile and cloud technologies allow organisations in Africa to leapfrog into the 21st century and create local opportunities for their young and vibrant populations.
Besides her commercial role, Laurence is also actively involved in inclusion, employment and digital education projects in the region. Over the last months, she and her team have been particularly active in Botswana, working jointly with the Botswana Innovation Hub and Microsoft 4Afrika in the launch of the first app factory in Botswana. Its aim is to improve youth employability by bridging the skills gap for graduates. AppFactory apprentices can spend up to six months working on real-world projects with senior software engineers. At the end of each internship, graduates are able to fully design, implement and deploy cloud-enabled, mobile solutions. Typically 85% of apprentices secure full-time employment within three months of graduating. Microsoft 4Afrika currently has 18 AppFactories across Africa and to date, 1,400 apprentices have graduated across the continent.
Laurence Janssens joined Microsoft at the beginning of 2015 as Public Sector Lead for Belgium. In this role she has assisted many ministries and international institutions in their digital and modernization journey over the last years. She was also board member of Microsoft’s Innovation Centers in Belgium (MIC).
She is a BAEF fellow, holds an MBA from the Chicago Booth school of business and a commercial engineer master degree from the KUL (Leuven). She is a member of Women on Board and has had the chance to participate in the mentoring program of Guberna.
Laurence Janssens holds both Belgian and Swiss citizenship, is married to a US citizen, and has 3 teenage boys.
She Goes ICT 2019
