Women in Tech series: Rorisang Motlomelo
Rorisang Motlomelo is based in Lesotho, where she heads up a team of business analysts and software developers as a Solutions Delivery Manager. It’s a far cry from her beauty queen days. Winning various pageants growing up, including Miss Queen of the Universe back in 2012, she has now turned her hand to creating solutions that will benefit our customers.
For International Women’s Day, she tells us about being judged for her appearance and why she believes it’s important for women to help build other women up.
As a Vodacom Innovation squad member, Rorisang is passionate about bringing new ideas into the organisation and developing solutions that are going to improve lives.
For example, she recently worked with a local female doctor to build a mobile app that offers digital consultancy for doctors, slashing consulting fees in half and bringing the people of Lesotho greater access to healthcare.
Rorisang explains how she had to consider the different languages of each customer, whether they would be able to read, and what device they would be accessing the app on, so that it could be developed with these considerations in mind.
Over time she has realised that her people skills and ability to think like the customer have helped her to perform her role well, but that wasn’t always the case.
“I never thought a girl in heels, a former beauty queen, would have anything to do with technology”
Coming into the industry, Rorisang remembers the prejudice she faced.
“I never thought a girl in heels, a former beauty queen, would have anything to do with technology,” she recalls an old colleague saying to her. She admits this made her feel nervous and, as a result, she began to change how she behaved so that she would fit in.
Fortunately, after some mentoring, Rorisang has since learnt how important it is to be herself.
Now, as a mentor, she enables other women to grow within Vodacom and, outside of work, she trains local, young girls on basic computer literacy so that they too can have a career in technology and build a better future for themselves.