Among the standout moments of the Women in Tech Africa Summit & Awards 2026 was a keynote from Executive Coach and TEDx speaker Cheryl Nankoo, who challenged the room to rethink what it truly means to belong in spaces of power and leadership.
Cheryl Nankoo, creator of the leadership framework Think. Speak. Lead., opened with a simple show of hands, asking the audience how many had ever been in a room they deserved to be in but still felt like they didn’t belong. From there, she built her case: that having a seat is not the same as taking your place in the room, and that the gap between the two is often shaped by unspoken assumptions, about confidence, authority and readiness, that quietly decide who gets heard.
The invisible checklist
At the heart of her talk was what Cheryl called an “invisible checklist” , the quiet list of conditions many women unconsciously feel they must meet before they can speak, contribute or lead: more experience, more credentials, more certainty. She illustrated this with the story of coaching a senior, highly capable woman who still froze in front of senior audiences, convinced she wasn’t ready, even though, when they examined the evidence together, no one had actually told her that. The judgment she feared had never happened.
She backed this up with data, citing a KPMG survey of 750 senior executive women in which 74% said they believed their male counterparts didn’t carry the same self-doubt they did. For her, the point wasn’t to dismiss structural barriers, she was clear that bias and underrepresentation are real and shouldn’t be minimized, but to name the additional, self-imposed barrier that so often goes unexamined.
Think. Speak. Lead.
Cheryl unpacked her three-part framework for the audience. Under “Think,” she urged attendees to challenge the assumptions they carry into a room before they’ve even spoken. Under “Speak,” she encouraged the audience to notice how often they soften or apologize for their own ideas “Now I’ve become fascinated by this in my leadership work because language doesn’t just describe reality. It creates it.” She shared. And under “Lead,” she reframed leadership as a question of identity rather than proof , choosing who you are in a moment rather than constantly justifying your right to be there.
To make the framework stick beyond the room, she offered the audience a physical anchor: pressing thumb and forefinger together as a private, in-the-moment cue to “stop editing”, a reminder to say what needs to be said rather than shrink to fit expectations.
A call to take the room
Cheryl Nankoo closed by acknowledging the real progress organisations like Women in Tech are driving, opening doors through education, digital inclusion, employment and advocacy, with the ambition of empowering millions of women and girls globally. But she was equally clear that access is only the beginning. “The future of technology will belong to those who speak, ask questions, give the room something that it didn’t already have, and leave without copying the person that led before them,” she told the audience.
She left the summit with a reframed question for every woman in the room to carry forward: “Perhaps the question isn’t when will women be ready to lead the future of technology. Perhaps the question is: when will we start giving ourselves permission to lead it?”
Her final challenge was simple, and it is the line the room walked out repeating: “You’ve got the seat. Now take the room.”
