Our mission is to create experimental and safe spaces for our members to achieve their career goals through a programs designed by and for designers.
Our vision is to build a community that enables a highly-skilled, diverse and fair design industry in South Africa.
She Can Do is a non-profit organisation founded in 2019 by Inez Patel, Masetshaba Motshekga and Kate van Niekerk.
Inez PatelInez is a product designer and leader with expertise in the financial services industry. She built her career specialising in UX, customer research, and strategy at EOH, 22Seven and the Vitality Group. Over time, Inez developed a passion for community building, design leadership and creating high-performing teams. She is currently the Design Director for Absa's award-winning banking app.
Masetshaba Motshekga Masetshaba is a UX Research Manager for Live TV and SVOD content streaming apps. She is passionate about serving people and solving problems that improve a user's experience in the job they intend to do. She spends her time talking to customers to collect data to influence business decisions and direction.
Kate van NiekerkKate is a freelance UX researcher with a background in social anthropology. She worked her way through several industries before finding her place in UX, and has always strongly believed in the power of design to create social change and improve lives, by seeking to understand how other people see the world and what they really need.
Globally and locally, women are underrepresented in positions of design leadership. Women in South Africa specifically are impacted by a of mentorship and female role models, and institutionalised gender discrimination in the workplace.
We formed She Can Do to address these disparities and to build a community that enables highly-skilled, diverse and fair design industry in South Africa.
Our community empowers and supports women at any stage in their design careers. Through events, mentoring initiatives, and most recently our training programme, we have been able to provide access to practical training and experience; and enable our members to share knowledge and skills amongst one another.
