How Sarika Modi Works to Make Visibility and Belief Count in Women’s Football
Ask Sarika Modi why any of this matters, and she does not reach for a marketing metric. “Visibility is really important. It changes what girls believe is possible,” she says. It is a conviction that has carried the qualified actuary from the boardrooms of South African finance to the front line of women’s sport, and into a landmark partnership that is rewriting what a sponsor can be.
On paper, Modi was built for a career in numbers. A Fellow of the Actuarial Society of South Africa, she spent her early years at the top of the country’s financial services sector before a fascination with people pulled her in a different direction. She insists the two worlds were never really at odds. “I don’t really think that I left the actuarial discipline behind,” she says. “My background has given me rigour.” What began as a curiosity about what moves people, and what makes brands matter in their lives, became in time an agency of its own.
Modi founded Triple Eight in 2012 as an independent, majority women-owned and women-led agency, built on a vision of purposeful brands and a commitment to people, planet and profit. Being independent, she says, gave the agency a clear point of view. Being women-led gave it something harder to manufacture.
“Being woman-led has also enabled a particular consciousness of lived experiences, so we care very deeply about understanding people properly.”
Triple Eight Founder and CEO, Sarika Modi
That instinct, to understand a person’s pressures, aspirations and realities before reaching for an idea, would later shape everything about how the agency approached women’s sport. The conviction that commercial value and social impact could be engineered together had taken hold earlier still, through her work in impact investing at Old Mutual and Alexander Forbes. “Impact and commercial growth do not have to compete,” she says.
It is also where the actuary reappears. Triple Eight pairs creative campaigns with in-house actuarial modelling, measuring not just whether an audience liked the work but what it actually achieved. Modi believes that rigour makes creativity braver, not smaller. “Measurement doesn’t take the magic out of the work,” she says.
“It really helps us understand where the magic is actually working.”
The discipline moves the conversation, she explains, from whether people enjoyed a campaign to what that campaign changed, a shift that has earned the agency the confidence of blue-chip clients across the continent. Today Triple Eight is a pan-African, through-the-line agency that has worked with more than 100 globally renowned brands, with deep operational ties to the national departments of health and education across several markets.
The results have travelled. Triple Eight became the first South African agency to win at New York’s Shorty Awards, took the Assegai Nkosi Award in 2023, and has gathered more than 60 local and global honours, alongside Agency of the Year recognition. Its public work runs deep, from the Connect-Ed schools programme with the Department of Basic Education to touchless handwashing infrastructure delivered with Dettol and the Department of Health.
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Selected for the Stanford Seed Transformation Programme in 2020, and a winner at the Africa Gender Mainstreaming Awards, Modi has built a standing that reaches well beyond marketing. Yet Modi measures success by something quieter than a trophy. “The recognition that stays with me most is when the work lands with real people,” she says.
That belief in proximity shapes how the agency is built. Alongside its strategists and creatives sits a research and empathy centre and a national network of brand ambassadors and health workers, people who know what will and will not work on the ground. “You cannot come up with ideas or understand people by sitting in an office,” Modi says. Every part of that chain, she adds, carries weight. “A weak link along any part of that chain makes the entire chain weaker.” It is an agency designed to deliver at scale without losing sight of the individual.
That capacity is what took Triple Eight into national-team football. In 2025, through the Unilever brand Shield, now Rexona, the agency worked with Banyana Banyana through the South African Football Association, an experience Modi describes as invaluable. “It taught us about what was needed, especially by Banyana Banyana,” she says. The agency came away with a real understanding of the women’s team, its rhythms and its needs, and a conviction that women’s football deserved to be approached on its own terms rather than as a smaller version of anything else.
In June 2026, that understanding found its fullest expression. The South African Football Association announced Stayfree, the brand distributed by Kenvue South Africa, as the Official Sanitary Pad Sponsor of Banyana Banyana, a first-of-its-kind partnership, with Triple Eight shaping the strategic platform and activation model.
Modi was determined it would be more than branding. “We could easily have just put Stayfree as a logo on a jersey and called it a day, but that’s not what we want to do,” she says. The brief was to connect the product to something that genuinely matters in women’s football: confidence, comfort and focus on the game.
The idea at the centre of it turns performance into tangible support. Through Goals 4 Pads, every Banyana Banyana goal unlocks 1,000 packs of sanitary pads for nominated schools, football academies and community organisations, with the first donation triggered by the team’s 1-0 win over Japan.
“We wanted every Banyana Banyana goal to create a moment of pride that reaches beyond the pitch.”
At the launch, one of those donations went to young footballers at the University of Johannesburg, a first visible proof of how elite success can be wired directly to grassroots benefit.
Behind the mechanic sits a harder truth. Period poverty is among the leading reasons teenage girls step away from organised sport, and Modi is clear that it should not be. “Menstrual-related challenges should not be another one of them,” she says.
She points to the conversation opened by Banyana Banyana head coach Desiree Ellis at the launch, about what it takes for girls to keep performing at their peak. “These are conversations that have not traditionally been had in sport,” Modi says. For her, the commercial logic follows the human one. “Female athletes and fans are not an add-on audience,” she says. “It is about recognising where the future of sport is going.”
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Which brings her back to where she started, to visibility, and what it unlocks. “When girls see women athletes celebrated, supported and commercially valued, it really expands their sense of what they believe they can become,” Modi says. But visibility, she cautions, cannot stand alone.
“Visibility also needs to be backed by access, coaching, facilities, confidence and real pathways.”
As Banyana Banyana build towards WAFCON 2026, the test she has set herself is whether a sponsorship can help lay those pathways down, not merely stand beside them.
And so it returns to belief. “Visibility builds belief,” Modi says, “and belief creates opportunity for athletes, fans, brands, and the next generation of girls.” For a woman who once measured risk for a living, it may be the surest bet she has made yet.
Main Photo Caption: Sarika Modi, founder and chief executive of Triple Eight, whose agency shaped the Stayfree partnership with Banyana Banyana that turns every goal into sanitary pad donations for schools and community football, part of a growing movement to keep South African girls in sport. All Photos: Supplied
Photo 2 Caption: Modi chats with Astrid Stealey, Kenvue’s Area Managing Director South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Photo 3 Caption: An actuary, Modi built her agency on rigour and purpose, and now stands at the centre of a landmark move in South African women’s football.
Photo 4 Caption: For Modi, backing women’s sport means building real pathways of access, coaching and confidence, not simply renting the moment.
Photo 5 Caption: Goals 4 Pads converts on-field success into tangible support, unlocking a thousand packs for academies and clubs with each goal scored.
Crédito: Link de origem