To ensure the credibility of the awards requisite to identify African women who can inspire their colleagues to greater accomplishments, we will use public voting to derive our awardees. This will ensure that awardees are women whose conduct and achievements are appreciated by a critical mass 0f Africans, both male and female. However, to ensure that the awards scheme does not degenerate to a simple popularity contest similar to political elections, we will engage in a stringent nomination process that will ensure that only women deserving of contending for awards will be put on the voting ballot.

Therefore, the awards selection process will comprise the following stages:

• Nominations will be invited from all across Africa. Both self nominations and third party nominations will be accepted. However nominations will be accepted based on their compliance to a carefully designed format that ensures that only nominees that meet stringent criteria are considered for awards.

• All nominations will then be verified for the accuracy of the information contained therein. Any application found to contain deliberate inaccuracies will be rejected. The nominations will also be assessed against the set down criteria for consideration for awards. Nominations that fall short in this regard will also be eliminated.

Both of these processes will be done by our dedicated independent consultants contracted by us specifically for these tasks, without any interference whatsoever from us as organizers.

Howevever there will be a separate segment of awardees who will be conferred with Lifetime Achievement Awards. These will not be selected by public voting but will rather be identified by qualitative assessment; following set down criteria, by the organizers in consultation with our contracted consultants for this purpose. Consequently they will not be nominated. Rather they will be identified directly by us and out consultants.

The manner of their selection will be clearly spelt out to the public.

• Nominations verified as accurate and ascertained to have met our awards criteria will then be put on the public voting ballot.

• Public voting will be done by email and SMS over a specified, publicly announced period, all across every African country that is a member of the African Union. The voting process will be handled in its entirety by consultants contracted specifically for this purpose without any interference whatsoever from the organizers.

• The votes will be compiled and verified in each country by independent, top tier indigenous firms licensed in each country. The votes will then be compiled and verified by one of the consulting audit forms and the results cross-checked by two others.