There is a moment that many women in East Africa's tech scene know deeply. It is the moment you walk into a room a pitch meeting, a hackathon, a boardroom and realise you are the only woman there. It is not a dramatic moment. Nobody gasps. But you feel it, quietly and completely, like a stone in a shoe.
That quiet friction has not stopped them. Across Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi, a generation of women is building companies, writing code, shaping policy, teaching children to think like engineers, and refusing to wait for a seat at a table they have decided to build themselves. Some of these women are on international stages. Others are in classrooms in Dar es Salaam, in fintech offices in Kigali, in community hubs in Kampala doing foundational work that rarely makes the headlines but changes the lives of thousands.
This is not a story about women who overcame the odds. That framing is too small, too passive. This is a story about women who changed the odds for themselves, and for the millions of girls who are watching.
The Landscape: A Region on the Rise and the Gap That Remains
East Africa's tech ecosystem is one of the most dynamic on the continent. Nairobi's Silicon Savannah has produced globally recognised startups. Kigali is building one of the world's most digitally connected governments. Tanzania's startup employment grew by 14.65% in 2022, with over 89,000 jobs created in the sector. Uganda is producing developers and innovators at speed.
And yet, the picture for women inside this ecosystem is uncomfortable. Across Africa, women account for 47% of STEM graduates — the highest proportion globally, higher than Europe (42%), Asia (41%), and North America (39%). But only 23–30% of tech roles in sub-Saharan Africa are held by women, and women occupy less than 12% of leadership positions in African tech companies.
The funding picture is starker still. In 2024, women-led startups raised only $48 million — just 2% of total VC funding across the continent, compared to $2.2 billion for male-led ventures. The lowest figure since 2016.
But numbers only tell half the story. The other half lives in the women themselves. Here are fifteen of them.
TANZANIA
1. Faraja Nyalandu — The Lawyer Who Rewrote the Classroom
Faraja Nyalandu was a lawyer. She had her LLB and LLM in Human Rights and Migration, a career in policy, and ambition to change things systematically. Then in 2013, Tanzania recorded some of the worst secondary school results in its history, and she made a decision that would alter the education landscape of an entire country.
She founded Shule Direct — a social enterprise that provides comprehensive web and mobile educational platforms offering national curriculum-based learning content to millions of in- and out-of-school youth. She built it because she remembered her own experience as a young mother studying for her law degree: e-learning had allowed her to connect with resources when she could not be physically present at university. If it had worked for her, it could work for millions of children across Tanzania.
It did. Shule Direct has been named Tanzania's Best Education Platform by the Tanzania Elimu Awards, received the Hall of Fame Award from the Tanzania Leadership Awards, and earned the Builders of Africa's Future Award. It is officially endorsed by the Tanzanian government as an eLearning partner.
But Faraja did not stop at one platform. She co-founded Ndoto Hub — Tanzania's first innovation space exclusively for women entrepreneurs. She chairs the Tanzania Education Network, serves on the World Economic Forum's Expert Network, and was appointed by the President of Tanzania to the End Malaria Council. The World Economic Forum named her a Young Global Leader Class of 2020.
She has a piece of advice she repeats constantly: "Just start. There will never be the right time, the right circumstances, or the right people. You just have to start."
2. Lilian Makoi — The Techpreneur Who Made Health Insurance Cost $1
Lilian Makoi lost a friend's husband to a treatable disease. The cause was not the illness it was the bill. He could not afford the medical care that would have saved his life. In Tanzania, where only 4.5% of the population has health insurance, that story is not unusual. But for Lilian, it was the moment that changed everything.
She had spent six years in the telecommunications industry, watching mobile money reshape how Tanzanians transacted. She knew that the same infrastructure that let you buy airtime could carry something far more consequential. So she built Jamii Africa — a startup that uses mobile technology to perform all the administrative activities of an insurer, cutting those costs by 95%, and delivering a health insurance policy for as little as $1 a month.
The logic was simple. The execution was not. It took Makoi over 10 meetings to secure Vodacom Tanzania's buy-in. She co-founded several companies, raised a seed round from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and fought through a fundraising environment where, as she put it, "Venture Capitalists often think that our responsibilities as wives or mothers will distract us from running a successful business."
Today, Jamii works with more than 400 hospitals serving over 10,000 customers. In 2016, the World Economic Forum recognised her as one of the most innovative women in tech in Africa. In 2020, she launched Mipango, an AI-powered personal finance app designed specifically for the Tanzanian context.
Makoi has a provocation she makes to other women: "Women have to start seeing problems in our communities as opportunities."
3. Lulu Ameir — The Woman Keeping Girls in School
This story begins with a statistic that should make everyone uncomfortable: only 2% of schoolgirls across Tanzania use disposable pads. Most girls in rural primary and secondary schools use rags, raw cotton, or maize cobs and when those don't work, they simply stay home. Research across East Africa has confirmed the direct link between limited access to sanitary products and poor academic performance among girls.
Lulu Ameir, a graduate of the University of Dar es Salaam Computing Center, decided that a vending machine could solve part of this problem. She founded Bela Vendor and developed an automated sanitary pad dispenser that could be installed in school restrooms, dispensing affordable pads for 200–400 Tanzanian shillings in the privacy of a restroom, without the need to ask anyone.
Her project was selected for the Data for Local Impact Innovation Challenge (DLIIC), which awarded Bela Vendor a $25,000 grant in 2017. The vending machines were later expanded with support from the US Embassy Tanzania, reaching multiple schools in Dar es Salaam.
In 2023, the story reached national scale. Tanzania's Ministry of Education commended Lulu Ameir and announced plans to install Bela Vendor's machines in all public schools. The government minister who made the announcement said, clearly: "Safe menstruation for girls in schools is very important for their academic growth."
In 2025, Lulu received the Innovation Award at the Tanzania Women and Technology Conference, which named her among the outstanding female-led initiatives redefining Tanzania's digital landscape.
4. Faith Msangi — The Student Building the Future of Chamas
Every neighbourhood in Tanzania has a chama — an informal savings group where people pool money, support each other through emergencies, and build slow, steady economic resilience. These groups are a lifeline for millions. They are also entirely analogue: paper records, manual calculations, arguments over figures, and financial blind spots that can destroy years of trust in a single meeting.
Faith Msangi saw this and built KAPPU — a fintech startup that digitises group finances through digital record-keeping and automation of repetitive tasks, bringing transparency, accountability, and ease to Tanzania's informal savings culture.
What makes Faith's story particularly compelling is where she is: she is still a student at the University of Dar es Salaam. She is not waiting to graduate, waiting for a job, or waiting for permission. She is building now.
In 2025, Faith received the Rising Star Award at the Tanzania Women and Technology Conference, recognition of a young woman who represents a generation that has decided to solve its own problems rather than inherit someone else's solutions.
KENYA
5. Juliana Rotich — The Architect of African Internet
Picture western Kenya in 2008. Post-election violence has erupted across the country. Information is murky and dangerous. Juliana Rotich, then a young technologist, decided to do something about it.
The platform she co-founded — Ushahidi, which means "testimony" in Swahili — began as a website for mapping incidents of violence and peace efforts during Kenya's crisis, based on reports submitted via web and mobile phones. Its success with 45,000 users in Kenya catalysed the realisation that the platform had potential far beyond its borders. Today, Ushahidi has a footprint in more than 150 countries, deployed in Haiti after the earthquake, in wildfire monitoring systems, and crisis response networks worldwide.
She then co-founded BRCK Inc., developing a battery-operated modem that can run for eight hours without electricity — designed specifically for African infrastructure realities. She later became Executive Director of BRCK's education arm, bringing connectivity to underserved schools.
In 2022, Juliana joined Safaricom as Head of Department for Fintech Solutions, scaling integrations for the M-PESA platform and serving on its AI Ethics Advisory Board at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She was listed by Forbes Africa as one of its Over 30 Under 50 Trailblazers Leading Change in 2024.
6. Judith Owigar — The Woman Who Opened the Door
In 2010, Judith Owigar attended the maiden launch of Nairobi's iHub and looked around the room. Almost no women. She did not just note it and leave. She went back with her friends and built something.
In 2010, Judith alongside Angela Lungati, Linda Kamau, and Marie Githinji co-founded AkiraChix — a non-profit aimed at increasing women's representation in technology. The word Akira is Japanese for intelligence; Chix is slang for girls. Together, they named something precise and fierce.
AkiraChix offers structured ICT training with full scholarships, teaching web design, mobile application development, and entrepreneurship skills. The programme expanded to reach underprivileged girls from Nairobi's informal settlements — women who had never held a laptop before they walked through the door.
Judith has been a keynote speaker at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing and the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, where she shared the stage with former US President Barack Obama and former Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta. Forbes named her one of Africa's 10 Female Tech Founders to Watch in 2014. She also founded Juakali Workforce, a platform addressing youth unemployment among skilled manual labourers in Kenya.
AkiraChix today has trained over 10,000 East African women in coding and technology.
7. Hilda Moraa — The Serial Fintech Pioneer
Hilda Moraa was a data analyst at Coca-Cola when she began asking a question that would define her career: what happens to the millions of Africans who need capital but fall outside the reach of traditional banking?
Her first startup, WezaTele, was acquired in 2015 for $1.7 million — one of the first successful tech exits in Kenya's history. That exit sent a signal across the ecosystem: this is possible.
She then founded Pezesha, which has built a scalable digital lending infrastructure that allows both traditional and non-traditional finance institutions to offer working capital to MSMEs. The fintech raised $11 million in a pre-Series A round in 2022 led by Women's World Banking Capital Partners II, and has funded over 500,000 SME loans in Kenya and Uganda. Her team is 50% women — a deliberate choice.
In 2024, Hilda was appointed as the eTrade Women Advocate for the English-speaking Africa region to UNCTAD, and won the Tech & Innovation award from Forbes Woman Africa. In 2023, she was named a Bloomberg LP New Economy Catalyst.
8. Nanjira Sambuli — The Voice in the Policy Room
Most tech stories are about building products. Nanjira Sambuli's story is about something harder: building the rules that govern technology and ensuring those rules don't leave people behind.
Nanjira Sambuli is a Kenyan researcher, writer, policy analyst and strategist who is a Fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She served as a member of the UN Secretary General's High Level Panel on Digital Cooperation (2018–19), as co-Chair of the Transform Health Coalition, and as a Commissioner on the Lancet & Financial Times Global Commission on Governing Health Futures 2030.
From her early research work at iHub Nairobi to leading the World Wide Web Foundation's Women's Rights Online work (2016–2020) — comprising a network of gender and digital rights organisations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America — she has been the person in the room who names the gap.
In 2019, she was named to the BBC 100 Women list. She advises the World Economic Forum's Technology and Social Justice initiatives and sits on the advisory board of the <A+> Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms. Her work is a reminder that the most consequential tech work is sometimes done without writing a single line of code.
9. Cynthia Wandia — The Engineer Rebuilding Financial Infrastructure
Growing up in Kenya as M-Pesa transformed how money moved, Cynthia Wandia saw something most people overlooked: the people M-Pesa could not yet reach. SACCOs — Savings and Credit Co-operative Societies — are the financial backbone for millions of Kenyans who do not trust commercial banks. And they were running entirely on paper.
Cynthia Wandia is a Kenyan electrical engineer and entrepreneur who graduated from Yale University in 2009 with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. She is also fluent in English, Spanish, French, German, and Mandarin — a polyglot building financial tools for Africa's most overlooked institutions.
She co-founded Kwara, a digital banking platform for SACCOs, credit unions, and community banks. Kwara's website states that it processes annual transactions of $420 million. The company raised $4 million in 2021 to build a neobank app enabling SACCO members to access their cooperatives digitally. Cynthia was named one of Kenya's Top 40 Under 40 Women by Business Daily Africa in 2018.
UGANDA
10. Barbara Birungi — Building Uganda's First Women Tech Hub
In Kampala, where women in tech had almost no institutional support, Barbara Birungi decided to build the institution.
Barbara is the Founder and Managing Director of Women In Technology Uganda (WITU), an organisation empowering women and girls from underserved communities through technology education, business skilling, and job linkages. Before WITU, she co-founded Hive Colab — Uganda's first innovation hub, business accelerator and incubator for East African technology startups. She had also served as Country Manager for Appfrica Labs, a software development consultancy connecting the world to African developers.
WITU operates on a philosophy that mirrors what the best East African women in tech have always known: getting in is not enough. You have to stay, grow, and lead. It opened the first women-focused tech and business hub to support early-stage women SMEs, offering a holistic programme covering personal development, leadership, computer science, entrepreneurship, and job linkages. The organisation has trained over 45,000 young women.
Over 75% of WITU's more than 8,000 alumnae have started their own businesses or landed digital jobs.
Barbara Birungi is building infrastructure, not just skills — and in East Africa's ecosystem, that difference matters enormously.
11. Deborah Mutungi — CIO of the Year 2025
There is a kind of leadership that does not announce itself loudly. It shows up at 2:00 am to support a team member. It redesigns the technology systems of a hospitality chain from the inside. It submits one of 1,200 projects to a continent-wide competition — and wins.
Deborah Mutungi is the Group IT Manager at Sarova Hotels & Resorts in Kenya, and she has been quietly doing some of the most impactful digital transformation work in East Africa's hospitality sector. With over 16 years of experience, she has led Sarova through a landmark digital transformation programme that significantly elevated customer experience through the integration of emerging technologies.
In November 2025, Deborah was crowned CIO of the Year 2025 at the 17th annual CIO100 Symposium & Awards — East Africa's most prestigious recognition in information technology leadership. Her project had emerged top among more than 1,200 submissions.
Upon receiving the award, she invited all women in attendance to stand with her on stage, saying that her victory was not hers alone, but "a win for all women in technology."
In 2024, she had already received the dxNova Woman of the Year award at the same event. Before that, she spent nearly 11 years at the National Bank of Kenya, building her expertise from the ground up.
She mentors four young women in technology with deliberate intention — telling each of them: "Find a mentor, if possible two: one for soft skills and one for tech skills."
RWANDA
12. Clarisse Iribagiza — The Entrepreneur Who Built Rwanda's Largest E-Commerce Company at 22
In 2010, Clarisse Iribagiza was a third-year Computer Engineering student at the University of Rwanda's College of Science and Technology, attending a six-week incubation programme run by professors from MIT. She connected the dots between what she was learning in class and what she could build immediately. She was 22 years old.
She launched HeHe Limited — which means "where" in Kinyarwanda — a mobile technology company enabling businesses to reach their customers on-demand. HeHe grew to become the largest e-commerce company in Rwanda, digitising over 200 businesses (60% of which are female-led) and serving 2 million consumers. She also won Season 1 of the East African entrepreneur reality TV show Inspire Africa in 2012.
Clarisse used her platform to go further. She partnered with GirlHub Rwanda to design mobile software empowering girls through ICT, critical thinking, and technology design. Her annual Innovation Fellowship programme groomed nearly 500 young Rwandans, 69% of them female.
In 2015, she was named in Forbes Africa's 30 Under 30 list. In 2019, UNCTAD named her one of only seven global "eTrade for Women Advocates from the developing world." She sits on the African Development Bank's Presidential Youth Advisory Group and was recently appointed to the Africa Climate Foundation's Advisory Council.
MIXED EAST AFRICA / UPCOMING VOICES
13. Linda Kamau (Kenya) — The Curriculum Builder Doing the Invisible Work
When AkiraChix was founded in 2010, Linda Kamau took on one of the most important and least celebrated roles: running the training programme. While others spoke on stages, she was in classrooms figuring out how to teach web development and mobile application design to young women from Nairobi's informal settlements — women who had never touched a laptop before they walked through the door.
Linda ran the training programme at AkiraChix, liaising with a staff of seven teachers to develop the curriculum. Their first grant came from Google in early 2012, and the grants have not stopped since. She spearheaded the curriculum that today informs how over 10,000 East African women learn technology.
She has since expanded her reach across East Africa, educating communities in Tanzania and the wider region about blockchain, fintech, and AI. She speaks with precision about the real barriers: "We recognise the things that hinder women students from succeeding — financial barriers, gender roles and not feeling believed in, a lack of encouragement to move into technology — and we want to break down as many of those barriers as possible."
Linda's impact lives not in a single product but in the thousands of young women who learned to code because someone built them a curriculum, handed them a laptop, and told them they were capable.
14. Carolyne Ekyarisiima (Uganda) — The Teacher Who Quit to Bridge the Gap
Carolyne Ekyarisiima moved from Uganda to Tanzania to teach computer science and ICT. And when she looked at her classes, she noticed something that stayed with her: the girls were a tiny minority. Not because they were less capable — but because nobody had told them they belonged there.
She started a club. The club was not enough. She realised the gender gap in ICT started in primary school, nurtured by stereotypes and a complete absence of encouragement. So she quit her teaching job and founded Apps & Girls in 2013 — from her living room, with borrowed laptops.
Apps & Girls is a Tanzanian award-winning nonprofit dedicated to bridging the technology gender gap. It provides girls and young women from underprivileged backgrounds — from secondary school to university and out-of-school youth — with high-quality software and hardware programming skills, mentorship, and entrepreneurship training.
She was awarded the African Union Education Innovation Prize in 2018, and in 2016 received a YALI fellowship and a $25,000 grant. Her alumni now run coding clubs in 24 secondary schools in Dar es Salaam, providing weekly training and mentorship to fellow students. UNICEF partnered with Apps & Girls for its EYES4D programme in Mbeya.
Her philosophy is direct: "We believe that if women or girls have those digital skills, they stand a bigger chance of being independent and having their voice heard."
15. Flora Kagoma (Tanzania) — The Young Innovator Mentoring Her Own Generation
Flora Kagoma's story is less than two years old and it is already one of the most compelling in East Africa's tech landscape.
She was a secondary school student in Tanzania when she attended the African Girls Can Code Initiative (AGCCI) coding camp — a programme implemented by UN Women in collaboration with Tanzania's Ministries of Gender, ICT, and Education. What followed was a transformation. She built a Smart Energy System that was showcased at TAWECE 2024, then developed an AI-enhanced drone for early crop disease detection that earned her second place in the Mama Samia Award for Best Agriculture Idea.
But Flora did not stop at winning. She turned around immediately and became a mentor. Today she mentors secondary students through Smart Girls in ICT across four regions — Arusha, Manyara, Tanga, and Kilimanjaro — advocating for the inclusion of young women in technological innovation.
She is not yet famous. She is not on a Forbes list. She is 21 years old and she is already paying it forward, ensuring that the girls coming behind her find doors already open.
Flora's story is exactly the kind of story this article exists to tell: the woman who is just beginning, who is already changing things.
The Real Challenges: What the Numbers Don't Capture
The data shows women receive only 2% of tech funding. That women hold fewer than 12% of leadership positions. That only 35% of Kenyan women use mobile internet compared to 50% of men.
But the data cannot capture the investor who asks a female founder how she plans to balance the business with having children — a question never asked of a man. The all-male panel where the only woman is the moderator. The teacher in Mwanza or Kampala who tells a teenage girl, in a tone so casual she nearly believes it, that computers are not for her.
Tanzania's own tech landscape reflects this: while the tech ecosystem is growing, women still face limited access to funding, gender bias, and inadequate representation in leadership roles. Only 15% of startup founders in Tanzania are female, despite women being a majority of the population.
Across the region, in 2025, gender diversity in funded startups actually declined — only 30 of 178 funded startups (16.9%) had at least one female founder, down from 18.5% in 2024. Even as total funding increased, women's share shrunk.
The challenges are structural, cultural, and financial — all at once. They require structural, cultural, and financial solutions — all at once.
The Opportunities: Why This Moment Matters
East Africa sits at an inflection point. Mobile money infrastructure is the world's most sophisticated. A young, tech-curious population is growing. The AI wave is creating demand for skills that can be learned — not inherited. Internet penetration in Tanzania has reached 50%, with a target of 80%, and investment in AI is projected to contribute $1.2 trillion to Africa's economy by 2030.
Rwanda's AGCCI graduates are attending international summits. Tanzania is allocating dedicated government funds — 150 million TSH specifically for female founders in tech. Uganda's WITU has proved that community-level training transforms families across generations. Kenya's AkiraChix has proved that when you give women technical education and confidence together, 60% find jobs or internships within three months of graduating.
The talent is abundant. What is still being built is the ecosystem that retains it.
What Needs to Change
The fifteen women in this article point clearly toward some directions:
More women in investment decisions. When women sit on investment committees, more women-led startups receive funding. This is documented, not assumed.
Earlier, more accessible technical education. From Flora Kagoma's coding camps in Manyara to Betelhem Dessie's mobile computer centre in Ethiopia's remote towns, the model of bringing education to girls — not waiting for girls to come to it — works. It needs replication and government investment across the region.
Platforms and visibility. The Tanzania Women and Technology Conference, AkiraChix alumni networks, WITU hubs — these are not soft programmes. They are the infrastructure of representation. A girl who sees Faraja Nyalandu or Clarisse Iribagiza on a stage updates her entire model of what is possible for her.
Honest conversations about funding. Women-founded fintechs have raised only 1% of total global fintech investment over the last decade. The gap is not an accident. It requires deliberate, funded interventions from government, development finance institutions, and private investors who understand the numbers.
The Story Is Still Being Written
The fifteen women in this article did not arrive in tech as finished products. They arrived as curious, determined people who found problems worth solving and refused to be told the solutions were not theirs to find.
Faraja Nyalandu built a classroom for every child who could not reach one. Lilian Makoi built health insurance for the 47 million Tanzanians who had none. Faith Msangi is still a student, and she is already reshaping how communities manage money.
East Africa's tech story — the real one, the full one — cannot be told without these women. It cannot be built without the millions of girls who are right now sitting in classrooms in Dar es Salaam, Kigali, Kampala, Nairobi, and Bujumbura, wondering if this world has space for them.
It does. These women are making sure of it.
Found this article valuable? Share it — especially with a young woman in East Africa who codes, builds, or dreams of doing both.
Key Sources & Further Reading
- Carol Ndosi, Medium — Women and Technology in Tanzania 2025
- McKinsey — Closing the Loop: Gender Parity in African Tech (2025)
- Techpoint Africa — Africa's Gender Funding Gap 2025
- Techpoint Africa — Female Founders Hit Five-Year Low in 2024
- UN Women Africa — Girls in ICT for Inclusive Digital Transformation (Kenya)
- UN Women Africa — Bridging the Digital Gender Gap in Tanzania
- CIO Africa — Most Influential Women In Tech Africa 2025
- Disrupt Africa — Gender Diversity in African Tech Funding 2025
