From Africa to WCA - empowering diversity

In 6 years, Rachel Muthoni has experienced four diverse roles in three different countries – what has been a constant is her growth mindset, supportive leaders, and her willingness to challenge herself personally and professionally.

Rachel Muthoni, previously the Implementation Manager Eastern Africa Area, has held a variety of roles in various countries since joining Maersk in 2016 as a Finance Business Partner for Eastern Africa Area.  She was responsible for generating additional business by overseeing new customer implementations by bridging the Product, Customer Service, Finance, Sales, and Operational (Execution) functions and driving the performance management. Despite being in this role for a year and a half, reflecting on this role, Rachel shared that it has been a fulfilling experience to get closer to our customers and be able to directly impact their experience with Maersk whilst supporting the revenue and gross profit growth in Eastern Africa.

Rachel will soon be relocating to Dubai, UAE, as she has taken up the role of Head of Ocean fulfilment WCA/AFR. Using her experience from the Area front line she hopes to bring a better understanding of our customer’s needs into the Ocean Customer Logistics (OCL) team as they transform towards customer centricity. She hopes to become a better leader, learn more about our ocean business to continue learning about our end-to-end business, grow her networks and enjoy the adventure of life in a new country. She is passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion and is looking forward to continuing this with the local teams in West Central Asia. Rachel shares,

Career highlights

There have been many, but Rachel is proud of how she handled her first relocation. As not only did she quickly adapt to a new environment, country and role whilst being away from her family and friends. She was able to deliver within this role growing the Africa inland business from 19 key corridors to more than 30 corridors, achieving both revenue and GP growth. Whilst doing this she was chosen to be part of the Africa Leadership Development Programme (ALDP) class of 2019 and graduated among the top in class of that batch.

Key learnings

All of the above-mentioned success comes from overcoming challenges and learning from our experiences to ensure we grow as individuals, teams, and the organisation as a whole. Rachel has learnt that with the right attitude, you can learn quickly and be adaptable.

Throughout her journey in Maersk, she is grateful to have had extremely supportive managers who encouraged growth by working on her development areas, challenged, and believed in her to deliver what was required.

Rachel is also a mother and has learnt that trying to juggle work and home responsibilities will often lead to less-than-optimal results on both fronts.

Her learning on this is to delegate what is possible either through reliable domestic help or her supportive partner, Rachel has been thankful to have both and makes a deliberate effort to spend quality time together as a family.

When asked if we can expect to see Rachel return to Africa, she had this to share,