Reframing purpose, property and empowerment
In her role as the first female managing director of SIP Project Managers, Farzana Rasool shares her insights on leadership, creating opportunities, mentoring others and fostering inclusivity in the work environment.
With a BCom (Law) and more than two decades of experience across financial services and property – nearly 10 years at Absa and over a decade at Redefine Properties – Marijke Coetzee brings more than strategic nous to the table. She brings intent. At Vukile, she’s proving that brand is not a slogan but a system of delivery that lives through people, operations and shared accountability.
It’s no coincidence that the woman shaping Vukile’s voice is also part of shaping its purpose. “If I’m not playing the role of changemaker, collaborator and custodian, I’m not doing enough,” says Marijke. It’s a philosophy that underpins every campaign, partnership and system she touches. In an era where property companies are being called to serve more than shareholders, she is a central figure in enabling Vukile to answer this call with confidence.
A strategic seat at the table
It’s rare for a marketing and communications executive to have board-level influence at a listed SA real estate investment trust (SA REIT). At Vukile, it’s a strategic move. “We’re invested in more than shopping centres; we’re invested in the ecosystems of stakeholders that we impact in and around our centres,” Marijke explains. “Brand is about more than perception. It’s about participation, credibility and sustained contribution.”
Vukile leads the retail property sector with its consumer-focused approach, implemented across a portfolio of retail assets valued at over R50 billion. Its commitment to customers shines through in its convenient, community-focused, needs-based retail centres. It is invested in a portfolio of 33 urban, commuter, township and rural malls in South Africa. Through Vukile’s 99.6%-held Spanish subsidiary Castellana Properties, it has a portfolio of 29 shopping centres and retail parks in Spain and Portugal.
Marijke’s role reflects Vukile’s commitment to integrating customer-first values into its core model as a business imperative. Under her leadership, marketing has transformed from a cost centre into a lever for strategic delivery and shared value.
This reflects her broader belief that a brand can’t succeed externally if it’s not lived internally. Under her leadership, marketing has evolved into an engine of alignment – where brand values guide not just messaging, but also how the organisation functions. Her model for impact echoes a disciplined framework: define the brand with honesty, engage employees in heart and habit, and embed the brand in operational DNA. It’s this operational alignment, she says, that turns a promise into performance.
All-round purposeful ESG
As industry frameworks begin to give weight to the social pillar of sustainability – long the “softer” sibling to environmental and governance factors – Vukile is already ahead and tracking measurable impact through its community initiatives. Marijke is instrumental in crafting that alignment.
“We are now starting to link every national and centre-level initiative to our five CSI pillars,” she says. “That includes gender-based violence (GBV) prevention, education, entrepreneurship, health and safety, and food security. We’re capturing that data across the business and the portfolio, as impact is only sustainable if it’s measurable and deliverable.” Here, again, she is applying a brand lens not only to storytelling, but also to strategy execution. For Marijke, a business that measures social impact is an affirmation of what a property brand should be doing anyway.
On empowering women
Among Marijke’s defining projects is Vukile’s Empowered Women initiative, a cross-country series of workshops aimed at addressing GBV at both grassroots and systemic levels. It builds safety, confidence and capability into the daily lives of women and girls.
Now in its second year, the programme spans eight retail centres and partners with leading NGOs like Action Breaks Silence and Mameza, creating safe, supportive spaces for women and girls. The workshops go beyond being reactive. They are preventative, developmental and inspiring. “Empowered Women is about ecosystems of support,” Marijke says. “It’s about equipping women with tools that last.” Through self-worth training, movement therapy, legal literacy and survivor storytelling, these sessions have reached over 900 women so far in 2025 alone.
Now, in the second half of 2025, Vukile will extend Action Breaks Silence’s work into five to eight schools near Vukile’s Dobsonville Mall, training local facilitators to deliver a six-week programme on emotional literacy, boundary-setting and personal empowerment to children as young as Grade 5. At school level, the organisation offers programmes for both girls and boys, recognising that meaningful change must be systemic, not selective.
Under Marijke’s stewardship, initiatives like this are business-critical. She sees them as a competitive advantage. “Our assets are embedded in communities. Our shoppers live there. Those communities must thrive for our business to succeed,” she says. This isn’t optics, it’s good business operations.
And her commitment is personal. When Buskaid, a Soweto youth string ensemble, celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2018, Marijke, then a sponsor representative, taught herself violin over six months so she could perform on stage with them. She is also personally involved in a number of woman empowerment initiatives in her private capacity. “Deeds surpass words,” she says. And she means it.
Leadership with layers
Marijke highlights that true empowerment goes well beyond one-off interventions or visibility campaigns. It’s about systemic conditions and the leadership to transform them. It’s also about personal growth.
She speaks candidly about her own journey, acknowledging how high-performance environments can harden young women and push them away from authenticity. Today, her style is as compassionate as it is strategic, grounded in emotional intelligence and empathy – what are often called “soft skills” that she now calls “essential skills”. This clarity of vision allows her to navigate the often uncomfortable intersection of business and society with nuance, and results.
Marijke is clear: “GBV is a hard topic. But it touches everything: health, education, workforce participation, generational poverty. If you care about the economy, you should care about this,” she says.
A model for the industry
Through Marijke’s influence, Vukile has further embedded social value into its brand architecture and boardroom agenda. By placing a communications and brand leader at this level of the organisation, Vukile signals what few others in the sector have: that how you show up matters just as much as what you own.
This has caught the attention of investors, tenants and communities alike. Increasingly, stakeholders are asking for more than metrics: they’re asking about values – and Vukile is equipped to answer. “Vukile’s people-centric model is not theoretical,” Marijke affirms. “It’s structured into our investments and our sustainability-linked funding. It’s how we operate.”
As she looks to the future, Marijke remains focused on scale, systems and sustainability. She wants Vukile’s impact to extend far beyond the walls of its malls – and long after her tenure. “Real leadership is creating solutions that are sustainable beyond implementation. Legacy is what you build into a business, so it outlives your tenure.” That might be her greatest strength: the ability to dream ahead, act now and bring others along.
