You've built the expertise. Now expand your influence.
A selective fellowship for accomplished women who want to build authority, communicate
their value with confidence, and become the obvious choice for leadership opportunities.
The Credibility Gap We Identified
Over years of building institutional and personal brands across the continent, the team at Brandbuilder Africa noticed a pattern repeat itself in almost every accomplished woman we worked with.
We saw women who had built incredible expertise. They had delivered results, and had earned the trust of the people working closest to them.
But somewhere along the way, their professional reputation stopped keeping pace with their capability. The doors to rooms where important decisions were made remained closed to them. Opportunities they were ready for did not always find their way to them. Their expertise was recognised by those closest to their work, but not always by those with the influence to help them get onto the step rung in the career ladder.
We came to call this the credibility gap.
Their competence was never in doubt. But there was a gap between the value they created and the authority they were perceived to hold — and we watched it show up, again and again, in the women we worked alongside.
The Credibility Clinic is a fellowship designed to close that gap.
The Fellowship Experience
The Credibility Clinic is a transformational fellowship designed to help accomplished women build authority, amplify their impact, and shape how they are known.
1. The Application
Your application to participate in The Credibility Clinic is an act of self-selection and courage.
Every submission is personally reviewed, and we select women whose experience, ambition, and professional gravitas will contribute to — and benefit from — the calibre of the cohort.
Acceptance is not automatic. Being selected is an acknowledgement that your experience deserves a bigger platform, and that you are ready to intentionally shape the influence you have.
2. The Executive Positioning Audit
Before the fellowship begins, every accepted participant receives a personalised Executive Positioning Audit.
This structured diagnostic examines five critical pillars of professional visibility — revealing where your expertise is already recognised, where your reputation may not yet reflect your capability, and what may be preventing the right people from seeing your value.
For many women, it becomes one of the most clarifying professional documents they have ever received.
Because before you can shape how you are known, you must first understand how you are currently perceived.
3. The Full Day Clinic
The fellowship culminates in a full-day, closed-door Clinic convening on 3 September 2026 in Harare.
This is a working session built around the insights uncovered in your Executive Positioning Audit. Every conversation, exercise, and exchange is designed to address the real visibility challenges of the women in the room.
You leave with clarity:
- who you are professionally,
- what has been limiting your visibility and influence,
- and what you need to do differently to be recognised at the level you deserve.
Importantly, you also leave with a framework for implementation.
Who This Fellowship Is For
The Credibility Clinic Fellowship is designed for women who have already built something substantial — and are ready for their professional presence to reflect the level at which they now operate.
It is for women who:
- Have established expertise and a strong track record in their profession, industry, or area of influence.
- Are recognised as capable, reliable, and accomplished — but sense that their visibility has not kept pace with their achievements.
- Are stepping into greater leadership, board, executive, entrepreneurial, or public-facing roles.
- Want to be more intentional about how they are perceived by decision-makers, peers, and influential networks.
- Understand that in today’s professional landscape, excellence alone is not always enough — your expertise must also be visible, understood, and trusted.
This fellowship is for women who are ready to move from simply being excellent at what they do to being recognised for the authority they already possess.
Who This Fellowship Is Not For
The Credibility Clinic Fellowship is not for:
- Women at the start of their careers, still building the expertise and track record this work is designed to make visible.
- Anyone seeking an introduction to confidence, career development, or social media technique.
- Those looking for a quick personal branding makeover, a formula for online popularity, or a collection of surface-level networking tips.
- Women who want visibility handed to them rather than built deliberately.
- Anyone looking for shortcuts.
If you are still building the expertise itself, or hoping visibility will arrive without deliberate effort, this is not yet the right place for you — and there is no failure in that. The Fellowship assumes the career is already built; it concerns itself only with how that work is recognised.
If that describes where you are now, come to us later. We will still be here.
Your Facilitator
Thembe Khumalo has spent her career on both sides of the credibility question — as the strategist building executive reputations, and as one of the few women sitting at the boardroom tables where those reputations are made or unmade.
She is a Non-Executive Director of the Mutapa Investment Fund, Zimbabwe’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, which oversees a portfolio exceeding US$16 billion across more than thirty state-owned enterprises. Her board career also includes seven years with the First Mutual Group, listed on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange. She currently serves on the board of Transmedia Corporation, a state-owned enterprise central to Zimbabwe’s broadcasting infrastructure. She has served as Executive Director of Island Hospice, a leading regional non-profit.
As Founder and Managing Director of Brandbuilder Africa, she has built a consulting firm trusted by some of the continent’s most respected institutions, Old Mutual, Zimplats, the World Bank Group, and the Embassy of Switzerland among them. That work taught her what she now brings to individual leaders: that at the centre of every great institution are people, and it is their credibility, as much as the institution’s, that ultimately carries the weight.
Thembe is a partner at Lubuto Learning & Development, delivering a values-based business education for conscious African leaders. A published author and former newspaper columnist, she is a prolific writer and captivating speaker, who aims to support strategic visibility for business leaders. She is a podcaster, a business coach, and a practitioner who has herself navigated the complexity of building a high-credibility personal brand across multiple professional identities.
How To Apply
The Credibility Clinic is not open enrolment. A limited number of senior professional women will be accepted into the Fellowship and entry is by application only.
The application itself is short and direct, with just a handful of questions about where you are in your career, what's at stake for you right now and an upload of your CV. It's designed to take you fifteen minutes.
We're looking for readiness. If you're leading, deciding, or building something that matters, and you've felt the specific fatigue of being underestimated despite it, you're the woman we’re looking for.
Once submitted, every application is read personally by Thembe and discussed with members of the Brandbuilder Team. You'll hear back within 7 business days — either an invitation to secure your seat, or, if the timing isn't right this round, an invitation to the next one.
Investment
A place in The Credibility Clinic Fellowship is $435 — a special introductory rate.
Payment secures your place and formally begins your journey. Once confirmed, we begin your audit immediately, and you receive your report ahead of the one-day clinic. Because each audit is done individually, payment must be received in full by 15 August 2026 to give us the time we need to complete every audit properly before everyone convenes on 3 September 2026.
You already know what it costs...
To be brilliant and unseen. To carry the weight of decisions no one names you for. To walk into rooms you’ve earned a hundred times over, and still feel the burden of proving it again. This is not another lesson in doing more. It’s a process built for women who have already done enough, and are ready to be seen for it, on their own terms.
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