In Nairobi, Female Coders Are Flipping the Silicon Valley Trope on Its Head

In the popular history of Kenya’s technology industry, women are at the center. It was a woman, Ory Okolloh Mwangi, who first put out a call on her blog, kenyanpundit, inviting coders to build a platform that would track violence and other emergencies following the 2007–2008 elections, resulting in the now global platform known as Ushahidi. It was market women, shunned by formal banks well into the 1990s, who arguably have been  driving the use of  mobile money, making Kenya the world leader in such technology. Advocacy through organizations like the Lawyers Hub, a leading digital law group, is driven by women, and the most prominent tech training platforms in the country, like AkiraChix and Akili Dada, were founded and are run by women.

Women are and have always been the beating heart of Africa’s unlikeliest tech success stories. But while women drive the conversation, Kenyan society still routinely treats the work of women as secondary. And so a group of Kenyan women is working to increase the visibility and influence of women in tech by providing the mentorship and skills that young women need to not only succeed in one of the most competitive tech markets in the developing world but have their contributions recognized as well.

“When you give women a fair chance, they thrive,” says Linda Kamau, founder of AkiraChix, one of the premier coding schools for women. “Women who have gone through our program only needed someone to show them a path, and then they took it and ran with it.” Since its inception in 2010, AkiraChix has trained hundreds of young women from across Kenya and, recently, into East Africa. Earlier in her career, Kamau—one of the leaders in Kenya’s nascent tech industry—witnessed firsthand how women were edged out of the tech space, not because they were less qualified than their male peers but because international role models—Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Tom the MySpace guy—were decidedly white and male.