Hellen Fissihaie
Hellen Fissihaie is a professional woman passionate about the growth and potential of emerging markets. She is of Eritrean origins, born in Sudan during the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia in the early 1980s. Ms. Fissihaie has worked across the continent in a variety of capacities and currently owns and operates F3 Global LLC, a capacity building strategy firm based in Washington, D.C. with offices in Ghana and Ethiopia focused on health, agriculture, and entrepreneurship for private and public sector clients in the U.S., Africa, Middle East, and the Caribbean.
Ms. Fissihaie’s company, F3 Global is a forward thinking tech savvy strategy firm focusing on programs, partnerships and capacity building life cycles that create inclusive sustainable impact in emerging markets. Her firm adds value by 1) driving impact through technology and data collection, 2) understanding cultures and markets of engagement, 3) bridging gaps using diaspora and local capacity and 4) facilitating business enablement. F3 Global is a 100% woman owned and operated small minority business whose collective experience and networks across emerging markets bring a fresh perspective to find goal oriented solutions to diverse challenges.
After University, Ms. Fissihaie has worked for a variety of organizations that honed her keen sense of problem solving, designing and managing programs, developing relationships, and understanding market needs and gaps. During her time at DFW International Community Alliance in Dallas, Texas, she designed and piloted a program focused on new immigrant women who came from the Middle East, Africa, and East Asia. Successfully graduating its first class of 90 women and expanding components of the programs into Universities, local community colleges, and city funded programs. Soon after, she moved to South Africa (Mpumalanga region), as a Director for four local communities ensuring that design thinking and asset based development were taught, that communities learned to use their local resources and skills to solve community challenges through the creation of businesses and organizations. During this time, she lobbied and partnered with tribal, community, and government leaders to assure the success of the program and businesses that were created. As a diasporan, her experience living and working across Africa have inspired her to be innovative in her approach to business, mixing private sector efficiency with the impact driven public sector to solve today’s challenges, offering new products and services to the market while maintaining the ability to be profitable.
Today, she has invested her skills, resources, and future to delivering value additions across Africa and expanding into various emerging markets across the Caribbean, Oman, and Bulgaria. Her company has worked and continues to work on public and private sector projects in partnership with country specific stakeholders in Tanzania, South Africa, Sudan, Nigeria, Uganda, Senegal, Ghana, St. Maarten, Oman, Eritrea and Ethiopia. Her projects range from Public Private Partnership investment funds in Nigeria focused on youth solving the climate change challenge, to telecommunication technology focused on disrupting the way farmers access buyers across Africa to telemedicine projects in the Caribbean. Ms. Fissihaie continues to help drive diasporans into the continent to ensure that experts return to their homeland and bridges are built with other international actors and markets. Ms. Fissihaie is a connector helping drive American businesses into the African market and other emerging markets. Her firm has established offices in East and West Africa as well as Washington, D.C. working for a variety of clients and brokering relationships across continents.
Africa is not just what Ms. Fissihaie calls home but also her passion. She believes that it has the potential to self-sustain, become a profitable marketplace, and innovate around its problems. After studying degrees centered on world politics, anthropology, sociology, the history of the market and its engagement with the world; Ms. Fissihaie is serious about ensuring that Africa and its Diaspora in the U.S., Caribbean, Afro-Latino nations, etc. are no longer considered to be rising but embrace its role in the world as a major player. Recognizing limitations and key barriers, she understands that it will take building bridges, pipelines, and relationships locally, within the Diaspora, and internationally with other countries to help the continent reach its goal. She also believes that attention must be paid to inclusion of youth and women within the marketplace, as the data proves that they will soon populate these economies. Her specialization is in working across sectors, demographics, and all levels of power to ensure outcomes are measurable and successful.