Rashida Abdulai of African and Caribbean descent, a Lawyer, Entrepreneur and passionate Speaker is the beautiful CEO of Strand Sahara, a pan-African legaltech company launched in September 2018, that leverages on technology to make world-class business contracts and corporate governance solutions easily accessible and affordable to African entrepreneurs.
Rashida has over 9 years’ experience representing some of the world’s largest corporations in high-value international disputes. She is a regular speaker and publishes articles on important legal developments and issues of interest to businesses operating in Africa through her website https://www.rashidaabdulai.com/
In the course of her practice, she recognised a “legal gap” between African businesses in search of investment and Investors and multinationals in search of investment-ready African businesses to invest in due to inadequate legal record-keeping and business structures, which resulted in them not been able to successfully scale up and achieve the job creation and economic growth that is required across Africa.
Rashida Abdulai
“The world needs more lawyerpreneurs and there has never been a better time to become one”
Strand Sahara was launched to solve this problem. Its mission is to empower fast-growth African start-ups and SMEs with the legal support they need to grow and attract investment as well as using technology to address the further challenge of providing effective, valuable legal services fit for the digital age. By creating systems that can provide legal solutions across the internet, Strand Sahara allows African businesses to tap into the legal expertise and services needed to become investment-ready in a more convenient, transparent and affordable manner.
In 2016 Rashida won the Career Woman of the Year at the Women4Africa Awards. In the same year, she received the Rising Star Award in the 40 under 40 category of the Nigerian Legal Awards, the only non-Nigerian lawyer to do so.
One of her favourite words goes thus: “Just because the past didn’t turn out like you wanted it to, doesn’t mean your future can’t be better than you ever imagined.”
I hope you are inspired. Have a super-duper W E D N E S D A Y!!!!!