Gisela Matavele Antman – The ambition to be good

She’s a pretty face. But Gisela Matavele Antman (Zambézia, 1985) always wanted to be more than that. And when she went into business, in a world dominated by men, she had to put femininity aside. Although doubly conditioned, for being a woman and for being young, she became a businesswoman. The verb was not random. It is the attempt to turn a process that must be respected verbal.

She started as manager at Villa Sands, a hotel resort of international standards in the Island of Mozambique, with the goal of making it sustainable and thus becoming the owner. From that first moment to the second, five years passed. It was between 2011 and 2016.

Graduated in Agricultural Sciences and Technologies in Italy, Hospitality and Tourism was the brave new world. But the fact that it was not her area of training, with the vices that schools often teach and that it was her first experience ended up contributing to her thinking outside the box and making Villa Sands what it is today. “I’m ambitious” – she says it already with her femininity recovered and without fear of the hypocrisy that makes ambition a defect and not a virtue, as if the ambitious were ruthless on their way to getting where they want to go. “It’s one thing to be ambitious, it’s another to be greedy”, she separates the wheat from the chaff.

In five years, Gisela went from manager to owner of the Villa Sands hotel, in the Island of Mozambique.

The ambition she talks about and the one that characterises her is what gives her the energy to wake up every day to be good, do it again, do it differently and continue to believe. She does it thinking about her, towards the idea of the entrepreneur she wants to be and the business she wants to build, but she also does it thinking about the people around her. The Art Gallery attached to Villa Sands, located on the threshold between the city of Macúti and Pedra e Cal, which serves as an incubator for child artists, is an example of this. “Part of the tourism profit has to benefit the community.”

But her interests are not limited to Hospitality and Tourism or the Island of Mozambique. She, who is always on the lookout for opportunities, because of the pandemic, decided to open GM Healthcare, a healthcare supplies provider. “It is a business concern, but also a social one.” But there’s also GM Property Management, a property leasing company that started in the Island of Mozambique with Dock Side and is now stretching its tentacles towards the country’s capital.

Issue 69 Sept/Oct | Download.