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. 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, and teaching children to think like engineers — refusing to wait for a seat at a table they have decided to build themselves. The numbers tell part of the story: women-led startups raised just $48 million in 2024, a mere 2% of total VC funding across the continent, the lowest figure since 2016. Women hold fewer than 12% of leadership positions in African tech companies, and in 2025, gender diversity in funded startups actually declined — only 16.9% of funded ventures had even one female founder, down from 18.5% the year before.
But numbers only tell half the story. The other half lives in the women themselves.
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 watching.
Here are fifteen of them.
TANZANIA
Faraja Nyalandu — The Lawyer Who Rewrote the Classroom
In 2013, Tanzania recorded some of the worst secondary school exam results in its history. It was a national crisis. Most people waited to see what the government would do. Faraja Nyalandu, a practising lawyer with a career in human rights policy, made a different decision: she would build the solution herself.
From Courtroom to Classroom
Nyalandu had her LLB and LLM in Human Rights and Migration. She had ambition and a career track. But she also had a personal memory she could not ignore: years earlier, as a young mother studying for her law degree, e-learning had been the thing that kept her connected when she could not physically be on campus. If it had worked for her, she believed, it could work for millions of children who couldn't reach a school, afford the commute, or access a qualified teacher.
She founded Shule Direct — a social enterprise delivering national curriculum-based learning content across web and mobile platforms, designed specifically for in-school and out-of-school youth across Tanzania.
Building the Ecosystem Around It
The platform worked. But Nyalandu did not stop there. She went on to co-found Ndoto Hub — Tanzania's first innovation space built exclusively for women entrepreneurs. She chairs the Tanzania Education Network, sits on the World Economic Forum's Expert Network, and was appointed by the President of Tanzania to the country's End Malaria Council.
Shule Direct has since 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 government endorsement as an official eLearning partner. In 2020, the World Economic Forum named Nyalandu a Young Global Leader.
Where She Stands Today
Faraja Nyalandu sits at the intersection of technology, education policy, and women's entrepreneurship in East Africa — a position she built, not inherited. She is the person in rooms where decisions about Africa's educational future get made, and one of the most consistent voices arguing that access is not a luxury, it is a prerequisite.
Her advice to other founders is the same thing she tells herself: "Just start. There will never be the right time, the right circumstances, or the right people. You just have to start."
Lilian Makoi — The Techpreneur Who Made Health Insurance Cost $1
A friend's husband died from a treatable disease. Not because the treatment didn't exist. Because he couldn't afford it. For Lilian Makoi, that death was the moment everything changed.
The Infrastructure Was Already There
Makoi had spent six years in Tanzania's telecommunications industry. She had watched mobile money reshape how millions of Tanzanians sent, saved, and spent. And she had a realisation that seemed obvious once she had it: the same infrastructure that let you buy airtime could carry something far more consequential — health insurance.
In a country where only 4.5% of the population had any health coverage, she founded Jamii Africa. The model was elegant and hard-won: use mobile technology to strip away the administrative cost of insurance by 95%, and deliver a health policy for as little as $1 a month.
Ten Meetings Before One Yes
The execution was not simple. Makoi spent months trying to convince Vodacom Tanzania to partner with her — it took over ten meetings to get their buy-in. Along the way, she navigated a fundraising environment she described with characteristic directness: "Venture Capitalists often think that our responsibilities as wives or mothers will distract us from running a successful business."
She raised a seed round from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and kept building.
A Platform Serving Thousands
Today, Jamii works with more than 400 hospitals and serves over 10,000 customers. In 2016, the World Economic Forum recognised Makoi as one of the most innovative women in tech in Africa. In 2020, she launched Mipango — an AI-powered personal finance app built specifically for the Tanzanian context.
Lilian Makoi has built a career on a single provocation she makes to other women: "Women have to start seeing problems in our communities as opportunities."
Lulu Ameir — The Woman Keeping Girls in School
Only 2% of schoolgirls across Tanzania use disposable sanitary pads. The rest use rags, raw cotton, or maize cobs — and when those options fail, they stay home. Research across East Africa has documented what that means for girls' education: missed days become missed grades, and missed grades become dropped-out futures.
A Vending Machine as Infrastructure
Lulu Ameir, a graduate of the University of Dar es Salaam Computing Center, looked at that statistic and asked a different question: what if the solution could be automated? She founded Bela Vendor and developed a sanitary pad dispenser that could be installed directly in school restrooms, dispensing affordable pads for 200–400 Tanzanian shillings — privately, without requiring a girl to ask anyone for anything.
The design was practical. The impact was structural.
From Grant to Government
In 2017, Bela Vendor was selected for the Data for Local Impact Innovation Challenge and awarded a $25,000 grant. The machines expanded across Dar es Salaam schools with support from the US Embassy Tanzania. Then, in 2023, the story reached national scale: Tanzania's Ministry of Education announced plans to install Bela Vendor machines in all public schools across the country.
In 2025, Lulu received the Innovation Award at the Tanzania Women and Technology Conference, named among the outstanding female-led initiatives redefining Tanzania's digital landscape.
What Ameir built is not, at its core, about technology. It is about a girl in a rural school being able to stay in her classroom. The vending machine is just the delivery mechanism.
Faith Msangi — The Student Building the Future of Chamas
Every neighbourhood in Tanzania has a chama — an informal savings group where people pool money, manage emergencies, and build financial stability together. For millions of Tanzanians, particularly women, these groups are a lifeline. They are also entirely analogue: paper records, handwritten tallies, and disputes that can destroy years of collective trust in a single meeting.
Building Before Graduating
Faith Msangi looked at this problem and built KAPPU — a fintech platform that digitises group finances, automates repetitive tasks, and brings transparency and accountability to Tanzania's informal savings culture. She is doing this while still enrolled as a student at the University of Dar es Salaam.
She is not waiting to graduate. She is not waiting for a job offer. She is not waiting for permission.
What She Represents
In 2025, Msangi received the Rising Star Award at the Tanzania Women and Technology Conference. The award recognises emerging talent — but the more significant signal is what Faith Msangi herself represents: a generation of young East African women who have decided to solve their own problems rather than inherit someone else's solutions.
She is, by almost every conventional measure, just getting started. And she is already changing things.
KENYA
Juliana Rotich — The Architect of African Internet
In January 2008, Kenya erupted. Post-election violence swept across the country. Information was murky, dangerous, and politically weaponised. Juliana Rotich, then a young technologist, decided that what the crisis needed most was not commentary — it was a map.
Building Ushahidi
The platform she co-founded — Ushahidi, meaning "testimony" in Swahili — was originally a website that allowed Kenyans to report incidents of violence and peace efforts via web and mobile. It gathered 45,000 users within Kenya almost immediately. And then it kept going.
Today, Ushahidi operates in more than 150 countries. It was deployed in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. It's been used in wildfire monitoring systems, election observation campaigns, and crisis response networks worldwide. What Rotich and her co-founders built to survive one country's political crisis became global emergency infrastructure.
Solving the Electricity Problem
She then turned her attention to a different constraint — not conflict, but connectivity. With BRCK Inc., Rotich co-developed a battery-operated modem capable of running for eight hours without electricity, engineered specifically for Africa's infrastructure realities. She later led BRCK's education division, bringing that connectivity into underserved schools.
The Role She Holds Now
In 2022, Juliana joined Safaricom as Head of Department for Fintech Solutions, scaling M-PESA integrations and sitting on the AI Ethics Advisory Board at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2024, Forbes Africa listed her among its Over 30 Under 50 Trailblazers Leading Change.
Rotich's career traces the full arc of what East African tech can mean: built in crisis, scaled globally, now shaping the ethical frameworks that govern AI on a continent where its consequences will be profound.
Judith Owigar — The Woman Who Opened the Door
In 2010, Judith Owigar attended the launch event for Nairobi's iHub — a moment that would become a landmark in East Africa's tech story. She looked around the room and saw almost no women. She did not just note it and leave.
Building AkiraChix
She went back with her friends and built something. Together with Angela Lungati, Linda Kamau, and Marie Githinji, Owigar co-founded AkiraChix — a non-profit combining the Japanese word for intelligence (akira) with slang for girls (chix). The name is precise and fierce. So is the organisation.
AkiraChix offers structured ICT training with full scholarships, covering web design, mobile application development, and entrepreneurship. Critically, the programme was built to reach women from Nairobi's informal settlements — young women who had never held a laptop before they walked through the door.
The Scale of What She Built
AkiraChix today has trained over 10,000 East African women in technology. Sixty percent of graduates find jobs or internships within three months of completing the programme. Owigar has spoken at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing and the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, sharing a 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 — the kind of second act that shows a founder who has never stopped asking: who is still being left out?
Hilda Moraa — The Serial Fintech Pioneer
Hilda Moraa was working as a data analyst at Coca-Cola when she started asking a question she couldn't stop thinking about: what happens to the millions of Africans who need working capital but fall outside the reach of traditional banking?
The Exit That Changed the Ecosystem
Her first startup, WezaTele, was acquired in 2015 for $1.7 million — one of the first meaningful tech exits in Kenya's history. In a landscape where the idea of a successful African startup exit was still largely theoretical, that deal sent a signal: this is possible.
Building Pezesha
She then founded Pezesha, a digital lending infrastructure platform enabling both traditional and non-traditional finance institutions to offer working capital to micro, small, and medium enterprises. In 2022, Pezesha raised $11 million in a pre-Series A round led by Women's World Banking Capital Partners II — and has since funded over 500,000 SME loans across Kenya and Uganda. Moraa's team is 50% women, a deliberate architectural choice.
Recognition and What It Means
In 2024, Moraa was appointed eTrade Women Advocate for English-speaking Africa to UNCTAD and won the Tech & Innovation award from Forbes Woman Africa. In 2023, she was named a Bloomberg LP New Economy Catalyst.
What Hilda Moraa has built is not just a company — it is a proof of concept for a different kind of African fintech: one that starts with the people banks ignore, and works backward from their lives.
Nanjira Sambuli — The Voice in the Policy Room
Most tech profiles are about building products. Nanjira Sambuli's story is about something harder: building the rules that govern technology — and making sure those rules don't leave people behind before they're even written.
Naming the Gap
A Kenyan researcher, writer, policy analyst, and strategist, Sambuli began her career at iHub Nairobi, doing research at the intersection of technology and society. She went on to lead the World Wide Web Foundation's Women's Rights Online programme from 2016 to 2020 — a global network of gender and digital rights organisations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
She served on the UN Secretary General's High Level Panel on Digital Cooperation from 2018 to 2019. She co-chaired the Transform Health Coalition. She sat on the Lancet and Financial Times Global Commission on Governing Health Futures 2030.
The Rooms She Has Shaped
Sambuli is now a Fellow at the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 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. In 2019, she was named to the BBC 100 Women list.
Her work is a reminder — one this industry needs constantly — that the most consequential tech work is sometimes done without writing a single line of code. Somebody has to be in the room when the rules get made. Nanjira Sambuli has made it her career to be that person, and to ask, loudly, whose interests those rules are actually serving.
Cynthia Wandia — The Engineer Rebuilding Financial Infrastructure
Growing up in Kenya as M-Pesa was reshaping the country's relationship with money, Cynthia Wandia saw something most people overlooked: the gap between what mobile money could do and who it was actually reaching. SACCOs — Savings and Credit Co-operative Societies — were the financial backbone for millions of Kenyans who didn't trust commercial banks. And they were running entirely on paper.
An Engineer Who Thinks in Systems
Wandia is a Kenyan electrical engineer who graduated from Yale University in 2009. She is fluent in English, Spanish, French, German, and Mandarin — a polyglot who chose to apply her global education to the financial institutions most Kenyan tech builders had ignored.
She co-founded Kwara, a digital banking platform for SACCOs, credit unions, and community banks, giving millions of Kenyans digital access to the cooperatives they already trusted.
The Numbers
Kwara's platform processes annual transactions worth $420 million. The company raised $4 million in 2021 to build a neobank app enabling SACCO members to manage their accounts digitally. Cynthia was named one of Kenya's Top 40 Under 40 Women by Business Daily Africa in 2018.
What makes Wandia's story distinct is the specificity of her vision: not fintech broadly, not mobile banking generally — but the specific, overlooked, deeply trusted institution that millions of Kenyans already used, and that nobody had yet thought to modernise.
UGANDA
Barbara Birungi — Building Uganda's First Women Tech Hub
In Kampala in the late 2000s, women in tech had almost no institutional support. There were no hubs built for them, no pipelines designed with their constraints in mind, no infrastructure that acknowledged their particular barriers. Barbara Birungi decided to build the institution.
From Hub to Movement
Before founding Women In Technology Uganda (WITU), Birungi had co-founded Hive Colab — Uganda's first innovation hub and tech startup incubator. She had served as Country Manager for Appfrica Labs. She understood how ecosystems were built. She also understood, from watching who was missing from them, that understanding ecosystem architecture was not enough — someone had to build the door for the people who weren't getting in.
WITU opened as the first women-focused tech and business hub in Uganda to support early-stage women SMEs. Its programme covers personal development, leadership, computer science, entrepreneurship, and job linkages — not one of these, all of them, because Birungi understood that technical skills alone don't keep women in tech.
The Evidence
WITU has trained over 45,000 young women. Of its more than 8,000 alumnae, over 75% have either started their own businesses or landed digital jobs.
Barbara Birungi is not building a programme. She is building infrastructure — and in East Africa's tech ecosystem, that distinction matters enormously. Skills without ecosystem support disappear. Infrastructure changes the conditions under which the next generation arrives.
Deborah Mutungi — CIO of the Year 2025
There is a kind of leadership that does not announce itself loudly. It shows up at 2 am to support a team member. It redesigns the technology backbone of a hospitality chain from the inside out. It submits one of 1,200 projects to a continent-wide competition — and wins.
Sixteen Years in the Making
Deborah Mutungi spent nearly eleven years at the National Bank of Kenya, building expertise from the ground up before anyone was paying attention. She then took on the role of Group IT Manager at Sarova Hotels & Resorts, where she led a landmark digital transformation programme that elevated customer experience through the integration of emerging technologies across the hotel group's operations.
The work was unglamorous. It was also transformative.
The Award That Belongs to Everyone
In November 2025, Mutungi was crowned CIO of the Year at the 17th annual CIO100 Symposium & Awards — East Africa's most prestigious recognition in technology leadership. Her project had beaten more than 1,200 other submissions.
When she received the award, she asked every woman in the room to stand with her on stage. "This," she said, "is a win for all women in technology."
In 2024, she had already received the dxNova Woman of the Year award at the same event. Today, she mentors four young women in tech with deliberate, structured intention. Her advice is specific: "Find a mentor, if possible two: one for soft skills and one for tech skills."
RWANDA
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. She was 22 years old. She attended a six-week incubation programme run by visiting professors from MIT — and she did not wait to graduate before acting on what she learned.
HeHe: Starting Where She Stood
She launched HeHe Limited — meaning "where" in Kinyarwanda — a mobile technology company enabling businesses to reach their customers on demand. The platform grew to become Rwanda's largest e-commerce company, digitising over 200 businesses — 60% of them female-led — and serving 2 million consumers.
In 2012, she won Season 1 of the East African entrepreneur reality TV show Inspire Africa.
Using the Platform to Build More Platforms
Iribagiza understood early that her success was leverage. She partnered with GirlHub Rwanda to design mobile software empowering girls through ICT 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 has since been appointed to the Africa Climate Foundation's Advisory Council.
Clarisse Iribagiza started a company before she had a degree. She then spent the years after it succeeded making sure others didn't have to wait as long as she had for the door to open.
ACROSS THE REGION
Linda Kamau (Kenya) — The Curriculum Builder Doing the Invisible Work
When AkiraChix was founded in 2010, somebody had to figure out how to actually 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 Kamau took that job.
Building the Engine No One Sees
She ran the AkiraChix training programme for years, liaising with a staff of seven teachers to develop the curriculum from scratch. Their first grant came from Google in early 2012. The grants have not stopped since. But the grants came because the curriculum worked — and the curriculum worked because Kamau was relentlessly focused on what the real barriers actually were.
She named them with precision: "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."
Expanding Across East Africa
Kamau has since expanded her work across the region, educating communities in Tanzania and beyond about blockchain, fintech, and AI. The curriculum she built now informs how more than 10,000 East African women have learned technology.
Her impact does not live in a single product or a single company. It lives in thousands of women who learned to code because someone built them a curriculum, handed them a laptop, and told them they were capable. That is a different kind of legacy — and arguably, a more durable one.
Carolyne Ekyarisiima (Uganda) — The Teacher Who Quit to Bridge the Gap
Carolyne Ekyarisiima moved from Uganda to Tanzania to teach computer science and ICT. In her classrooms, she kept noticing the same thing: the girls were a tiny minority. Not because they were less capable — but because nobody had ever told them they belonged there.
From Club to Nonprofit
She started a club. The club helped. But the more she paid attention, the more she understood the problem: the gender gap in ICT started in primary school, embedded in stereotypes so casual they were nearly invisible. A club wasn't enough.
So in 2013, she quit her teaching job and founded Apps & Girls from her living room, with borrowed laptops. The nonprofit provides girls and young women from underprivileged backgrounds — secondary school through university, and including out-of-school youth — with software and hardware programming skills, mentorship, and entrepreneurship training.
The Results
In 2016, Ekyarisiima received a YALI fellowship and a $25,000 grant. In 2018, she received the African Union Education Innovation Prize. Apps & Girls alumni now run coding clubs in 24 secondary schools across Dar es Salaam. UNICEF partnered with Apps & Girls for its EYES4D programme in Mbeya.
Her philosophy has not changed since the day she sat in her living room with borrowed laptops: "We believe that if women or girls have those digital skills, they stand a bigger chance of being independent and having their voice heard."
Flora Kagoma (Tanzania) — The Young Innovator Mentoring Her Own Generation
Flora Kagoma was still a secondary school student when she attended the African Girls Can Code Initiative coding camp — a programme run by UN Women in partnership with Tanzania's Ministries of Gender, ICT, and Education. What she learned there didn't just teach her to code. It changed what she thought was possible.
Building From the First Opportunity
She built a Smart Energy System that was showcased at TAWECE 2024. Then she developed an AI-enhanced drone for early crop disease detection — a tool with real agricultural stakes in a country where farming employs over 60% of the workforce. That project earned her second place in the Mama Samia Award for Best Agriculture Idea.
She was not yet famous. She was barely out of secondary school. And she did not stop to wait for recognition.
Paying It Forward at 21
Flora immediately turned around and became a mentor. Today she works with secondary school 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 21 years old. She is not on a Forbes list. She does not have a TED talk or a Series A. But she is already ensuring that the girls coming behind her find doors already open — which is, in the end, what every woman in this article has spent their career doing.
Flora Kagoma's story is the one this entire article exists to tell: the woman who is just beginning, who is already changing things.
The Numbers Behind the Stories
The data framing these fifteen lives is stark. Only 23–30% of tech roles in sub-Saharan Africa are held by women. Women-led startups raised just $48 million in 2024 — 2% of total VC funding. Tanzania's female startup founder rate sits at 15%, despite women being a majority of the population. In 2025, gender diversity in funded startups declined for the second consecutive year.
But the data cannot capture the investor who asks a female founder how she plans to balance her 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.
The challenges are structural, cultural, and financial — all at once. They require structural, cultural, and financial solutions — all at once.
Why This Moment Matters
East Africa sits at an inflection point. Mobile money infrastructure here 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 government target of 80%. Investment in AI is projected to contribute $1.2 trillion to Africa's economy by 2030.
Tanzania is allocating dedicated government funds — 150 million TSH specifically for female founders in tech. Rwanda's AGCCI graduates are attending international summits. 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, the results are immediate and measurable.
The talent is abundant. What is still being built is the ecosystem that retains it.
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 47 million Tanzanians who had none. Clarisse Iribagiza launched Rwanda's largest e-commerce platform before she had her degree. Faith Msangi is still a student, and she is already reshaping how communities manage money. Flora Kagoma is 21 and already teaching the generation that comes after her.
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
