"We Are Not Men’s Rivals…We Are Collaborators…A Team”

CAF Lady of the moment, Johansen, has made her first open statement about her vision for African Women's football.

Friday evening the capital city of Luanda in Angola held a red carpet glittering event where the rich, famous and powerful of Angola congregated for a dinner reception celebrating the elected CAF Executive, Dr Rui Eduardo Santos Campos.

Campos, one of Angola's wealthiest entrepreneurs and humanitarian brought together international personalities like South African business mogul and Fifa President contender Tokyo Sexwale amongst others to a reception showing the various humanitarian and social responsibility interests of Campos, who not only owns a Premier League club, but also successful basketball and European Racing team.

CAF 1st Vice President Kwesi Nyantakyi, representing CAF President Ahmad was in attendance, with speeches from President of Cape Verde FA in the company of colleagues.

The Sierra Leone FA President Isha Johansen made a closing presentation stole the program and grabbed the attention of the 300 guests; speaking of what she predicted would be the "next revelation" - Women's football in Africa.

She went through the history of the first world female football tournament hosted by FIFA in 1991 with Nigeria being the first and only African country to qualify.

"45 countries went for qualifiers, 12 qualified with one African team, Nigeria"

By the 2015 edition in Canada, I was privileged to be a FIFA match commissioner and I commissioned the group from where the eventual champions emerged."

Johansen, who is also the female member on the CAF Executive Committee went on to say that Africa increased its number of qualified participants by two - Cameroon and Ivory Coast. "I still think that when it comes to global participation in both male and female tournaments, we see the same token participants we need to raise our game and make our sport more competitive so that we can be on the same global standards as our European and Asian sisters"

She touched on the women’s AFCON and noted that "Ghana and Nigeria were the pace setters but Cameroon and teams like Equatorial Guinea have started to give Nigeria a rude awakening".

She praised the efforts of Uganda, Tanzania, Egypt, Sierra Leone for rising to the occasion and taking the women's game seriously and competitively.

She finally ended on a positive note, promising that in July she will outline at the forthcoming CAF symposium in Morocco, her vision, plan of action and the needs to move women's football in Africa forward.