Leading Ladies Africa: Hi Hannah! Can you tell us about yourself?

Hannah Kwaw: I am Hannah Kwaw, a software developer and content creator. My primary skills are in Reactjs, JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

Leading Ladies Africa: How did you become interested in tech? Can you tell us a bit about how your journey to tech started?

Hannah Kwaw: My interest in tech started when I was in secondary school. A friend advised me to select computer science as part of my courses in applying to the university. So I did just that and I got the opportunity to study computer science. But I must add that my passion for coding and tech as a whole really came to light after my computer science degree.

Leading Ladies Africa: What is a typical day at your job like?

Hannah Kwaw: A typical day in my life involves coding of course, and short meetings.

Leading Ladies Africa: What does it feel like to be a woman in tech?

Hannah Kwaw: It feels really great to be in tech. I like the exposure that it gives and a host of other opportunities I get to learn new things and that alone is awesome.

Leading Ladies Africa: Do you have any advice for women entering the tech industry?

Hannah Kwaw: I would say that if you aspire to be in tech you can definitely do it. Allow yourself to go through your learning curve and it will be fulfilling to see what you can do in the future.

Audrey Mengue is a software engineer at Turntabl Ghana Limited. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Information technology from Accra Institute of Technology.

Aside from her work activities, she is also a women in STEM(Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) advocate and a speaker, thus an active member of organizations like byteAfrica, Microsoft User Group Ghana, PyLadies Ghana and Developers in Vogue which help individuals to transition or enter the STEM field. During her spare time, she likes exploring nature or visiting new countries.

Leading Ladies Africa: Hi Audrey! Can you tell us about yourself?

Audrey Mengue: Hi I am Audrey Mengue, a software engineer at Turntabl Ghana. I have a degree in Information Technology and when I am not at work, I volunteer with organizations to teach people about tech.

Leading Ladies Africa: How did you become interested in tech? Can you tell us a bit about how your journey to tech started? 

Audrey Mengue: My journey in tech officially started at DiVA festival 2018 organized by Developers in Vogue. During that day I realized that women from all backgrounds could actually add tech to their career bag and I felt really empowered. After that I attended one of their bootcamps “Speak Python 2.0” and that was it. I went on to volunteer more with tech communities and all that led me to where I am now.

Leading Ladies Africa: What is a typical day at your job like?

Audrey Mengue: I will be at work from 9am to 6pm with an hour for lunch. So work starts with the daily scrum meeting where I discuss my task with my team and my manager – it usually lasts 45 mins – after that, I code using React and Springboot. Then, I have lunch and after lunch, back to coding again. Coding is actually the best part of my day. My day is pretty code heavy rather than meeting heavy. After work I just take 30 mins off to 2hours off – depending on my personal plans – to relax then I will work on my personal projects. 

Leading Ladies Africa: What does it feel like to be a woman in tech?

Audrey Mengue: Well it’s very challenging. Between the mood swings due to my period and the deadlines to deliver a feature, it can be pretty difficult but it gets better as long as I love what I do. I am continuously learning to challenge and improve myself. One thing I have noticed is that women get a lot of support to break into tech but once they are there, they are just normal engineers who will have to prove that they are up for the challenge and can deliver. So I highly encourage women to take their studies very seriously. Tech is about skills and nothing else so you better master your craft if you want to strive.

Leading Ladies Africa: Do you have any advice for women entering the tech industry?

Audrey Mengue: The advice I will give is: “You will be identified as a female engineer before you enter the field but once you are in, you are an engineer just like everybody else so master your craft and do not be afraid to take risks.”

Jennifer Opal is a multi-award winning DevOps Engineer, Technologist, Technical Blogger, Keynote Speaker & Neurodiversity & Inclusion Advocate based in the UK.

She wears many hats including sitting on the Co-Production Board of a charity, ‘Neurodiversity In Business’ as well as being the Founder of The Opal Blog; a platform that has gained recognition for its human stories on her experience of being a black, neurodivergent woman in the technology industry.

She also writes content focusing on technologies within DevOps & neurodiversity in an effort to educate those interested in learning about DevOps as well as those wanting to learn about neurodiversity & inclusion within the tech space as well as outside of it.

She was the winner of the Tech Women 100 Awards 2020 & the Rising Star Award at the Black Tech Achievements Awards 2020. She has gained multiple nominations & recognitions such as being named as one of the Most Influential Women In Tech by ComputerWeekly.com in 2019, 2020 & 2021 & nominated for the Rising Technologist Award 2020 for Booking.com’s Technologist Playmaker Awards 2020. She has been featured in Refinery29, The Guardian, BBC News, Silicon Republic & more.

Jennifer also co-authored a book called ‘The Voices In The Shadow‘; a book that showcases 51 stories of black women in tech, including her own. The book is being distributed in schools across the UK & Ireland as well as being sold globally.

As a Keynote Speaker, Jennifer has worked with Bloomberg, Google, HackaJob, Coding Black Females, Code First: Girls & WeAreTechWomen to name a few.

Ruth Iselema is the founder & CEO of Bitmama Inc., a fintech company with two flagship products, Changera and Bitmama.

Bitmama is a highly-secure crypto-fiat exchange that allows traders to buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum and other digital assets in Africa, Changera is a solution that makes cross-border payments easy and efficient for businesses and individuals.

Ruth Iselema is one of the few female leaders in Africa’s blockchain space. Prior to founding Bitmama, Ruth consulted for other leading global exchanges and blockchain protocols on their product strategy and market entry into Africa.

Ruth graduated as a Pharmacist from Central University Accra, Ghana and forayed into entrepreneurship back in 2013 when the African blockchain and fintech landscape were quite nascent. Crypto traders relied on social media like WhatsApp and Telegram to exchange coins despite associated risks and the process of conducting cross-border remittances proved very rigid for individuals and businesses.

In 2016, she was inspired to build solutions that address both challenges in parallel. This led to the birth of Bitmama Inc. In 2018, Bitmama emerged one of the startups selected for the inaugural Greenhouse Lab female accelerator by Venture Garden Group. Since then, the company has joined other accelerators and programs like LSETF, Seedstars and Startup Germany.

 With over 6+ years of blockchain experience, Ruth leads a distributed global team of 25+ at Bitmama spread across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya. Fondly called the Bitmama of Africa’s blockchain space, Ruth has also been recognized as one top 20 individuals shaping Africa’s blockchain space by leading media such as CryptoAssetBuyer and received other recognition from the German and Austrian Missions in Africa. 

Shamim Nabuuma Kaliisa  is the founder and Executive Director of Chil Artificial Intelligence Lab, pursuing artificial intelligence in medicine. The 24-year old social entrepreneur from Uganda, who is the mastermind behind a popular cancer screening app that is helping thousands of women in various countries throughout Africa. A cancer survivor herself, her company offers innovative artificial intelligence-guided E-Oncology services to diagnose cervical and breast cancer. Both of these types of cancers, if detected and treated early, can save a person’s life. Her company Chil Artificial Intelligence Lab was founded out of both passion and personal experience.

When she was 13, she lost her mother to cervical cancer. Kaliisa’s mother had one last wish. “She called for me from school and when I reached the Uganda Cancer Institute, my mother told me ‘my daughter, study hard and become a doctor and look for a way to extend services to women like your mother who lacked key screening services in our villages’,” Kaliisa recounts. Those last words sank in and the young Kaliisa vowed to fulfill her mother’s dream. But things took a different turn. During her second year pursuing a bachelor’s degree in medicine and surgery, she felt an unusual pain in one of her breasts and she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Luckily, it was still in its early stages and she was treated.

These experiences led to her founding a company in 2017 to offer mobile cancer screening, which later incorporated the use of artificial intelligence guided e-oncology services (to detect cervical and breast cancer). 

Today, her company also incorporates drone services for easier transportation of cervical cancer specimens from the rural areas to laboratories without women having to travel long distances out of the villages. Kaliisa, who locals refer to as “mama cancer”, is a winner of the Takeda Young Entrepreneur Award 2018, Young African Entrepreneur Award 2018, Social Impact Finalist AWIEF Awards 2018, has received an Honourable Mention at the Maathai Impact Award 2019, and was chosen among the top 10 artificial intelligence companies founded in Africa by Google for start-ups. She has also been endorsed by the Tony Elumelu Foundation. Kaliisa continues to make strides in the field of cancer screening. 

Hilda Moraa is currently the Founder & CEO of Pezesha, a digital financial infrastructure enabling SMEs and institutions in Africa.

Prior to this, she founded WezaTele, a Fintech startup in Kenya that was acquired in 2015. She also led Pezesha to be the first company to exit from the CMA regulatory sandbox and get approval.

She is an award-winning innovator and author with over a decade of experience in Fintech, Regulation, developing innovations, entrepreneurship and working with multinationals such as Coca-Cola to develop mobility innovations for Africa. 

Hilda holds a Business Information Technology Degree from Strathmore University. In 2015 she was also featured as one of the top 40 under 40 women and Quartz Africa as top 30 innovators in Africa in 2018.. She has continued to champion the local tech, innovation & Entrepreneurship scene in Kenya by supporting and mentoring other young techpreneurs through sharing her lessons, entrepreneurial knowledge and experiences in inspiring ways such as through her first book that was published when she was only 26 years old- “A Kenyan Startup Journey- 10 Key Lessons I learnt”(Which can be purchased from this link here (https://hildamorara.com/index.php/buy-my-book/). 

She was also a keynote speaker at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2015. And in 2019, she was among the few selected to be part of the Obama Leaders Program. To learn more about her journey and lessons visit her personal website at https://hildamorara.com/

Hilda is also celebrated across Africa as one of the 50, Africa’s most promising innovators by Global Shakers because of the impactful work she leads at Pezesha #Africaday2020. See the full list here https://lnkd.in/etpidut

In 2020, She was also appointed to the COVID-19 ICT & Innovations Advisory Committee for Kenya at large. An honour to serve with the other appointed great leaders who are at the frontline of driving change in tech and innovation in Kenya and across Africa.

Tara Reed is a tech entrepreneur and the non-technical founder/CEO of fast-growing startup, Kollecto, an app for affordable art.

Tara Reed built Kollecto’s app without writing a single line of code. Tara frequently blogs about how to ‘build without code’ and has inspired hundreds of non-technical founders to launch their own apps, using what she calls a ‘code-free toolkit’.

The success of her Kollecto app led her to give a TEDx Talk which went viral with more than 400,000 views and after this, she launched Apps Without Code to share her experience and knowledge with others who had great ideas, but weren’t technically inclined and they have had over 40,000 students benefit from this initiative. Tara Reed is also on the Forbes 30 under 30 list.

Prior to launching Kollecto, Tara drove software marketing initiatives at Google, Foursquare, & Microsoft.

Mélissa Ketchandji is the lead Designer at Merkle & the founder of DigitalMayven, a platform that empowers entrepreneurs and content creators to use digital tools to grow their businesses online. ⠀⠀⠀⠀

Mellisa started out by  pursuing a career in fashion marketing and interning at luxury brands like Oscar de la Renta and Saint Laurent (YSL).  She then realized that her passions was outside of marketing with the help of an online personality test, and made the big switch  into the world of coding as a web developer and UX designer.

Melissa’s journey from luxury digital marketer to self taught UX Designer & front-end programmer is a proof that there is space for everyone looking to transition into tech.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

She has also worked for companies like Microsoft, Ralph Lauren, Northern Trust, & SNL Banker.

Melissa now helps and mentors aspiring UX Designers who also want to make the transition into the field of UX through 101 calls to help them land a job. 

 Eyitemi Rachael Popo is an entrepreneur who invests in products, services, and ecosystems that help women thrive. Whether through media, technology or tourism, her focus is on creating sustainable growth for women-focused initiatives, especially in Africa. She believes there is so much space for disruption with products and services that meet the needs – and ambitions – of women; especially those on the African continent.

She is the CEO of Ayiba Media and Girls Trip Tours, a transformative travel experience focused on female empowerment. Alongside her businesses, she works in deep tech VC as an entrepreneur in residence. Temi was named by Colombia’s Manos Visibles as a “Who’s Who” in the African Diaspora and a Leading Woman by BusinessDay Nigeria.

She graduated with high honors from Mount Holyoke College, and also holds a Master’s in Digital Experience Innovation from the University of Waterloo and is certified in digital publishing from NYU. Popo comes from a lineage of barrier-breaking women; her grandmother graduated with honors from the University of St Andrew’s in Scotland and became the first Nigerian woman to serve as a permanent delegate at UNESCO in Paris. She was also the first woman to reach the highest level at the Nigerian Ministry of Education. She basically built the education system all Nigerians follow today.

With Ayiba Magazine, Popo has followed in her grandmother’s footsteps and worked to amplify the African female voice in media, as well as create business opportunities in Africa for creatives and entrepreneurs. One of the main strengths of the magazine is that their readers are also their contributors. This “by us for us” approach positions Africans to be in control of the narratives that shape their stories, reducing the risk of stereotypes becoming barriers to investment and growth.

Yanmo Omorogbe is the co-founder and COO of Bamboo. Yanmo leads growth and operations as the COO of Bamboo. Bamboo is a digital investment platform that gives Nigerians real-time access to buy, sell or hold assets traded on the US stock exchange from their mobile phones or computers.

Omorogbe is the operational backbone of a business turning ordinary Nigerians into global investors. With Bamboo, the average Nigerian can become a shareholder in the technology companies they use every day like Twitter, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook.

Before Bamboo, Yanmo worked as an investment analyst, and then investment associate at African Infrastructure Investment Managers (AIIM), which develops and manages private equity infrastructure funds designed to invest long-term institutional unlisted equity in African infrastructure projects.

She cut her teeth as a business development professional and actuary with Wecyclers Corporation and Tokio Marine Kiln respectively.

She is dedicated to facilitating the continued growth of organisations she has found herself. An alumna of Chemical Engineering from Imperial College, London, she was previously an assistant to the Nigerian Minister of Power, Works and Housing. She then returned to the private sector as part of the Transaction and Asset Management teams at African Infrastructure Investment Managers (AIIM), one of Africa’s largest infrastructure private equity fund managers.

Yanmo is working to even the playing field for access to global investment opportunities for Nigerians, helping them grow their personal wealth.