The Women Driving Educate! Towards a Tech-Enabled Future
In today’s ever-changing world, ensuring that women are not only included but at the forefront of design and technology is pertinent to growth and development.
Despite accounting for half of the population, studies show that women constitute just 30% of the tech industry in Sub-Saharan Africa. Persistent gender inequality in the workforce not only limits women’s potential but also their organization’s.
Laetitia Benimana, Senior Data Systems Associate
At Educate!, we go beyond ensuring that girls and women have equal access to opportunities by designing solutions that aim to promote equity and close gender gaps. For over ten years, we’ve implemented evidence-based strategies with real and measurable results, including the fact that girls participating in Educate! are 22% more likely to choose a business or STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) degree. In addition to empowering the young women and girls that participate in our models, we also seek to empower the women driving them forward. We recently spoke to some of our leading tech team members to learn more about their experiences and to better understand how Educate! is leveraging technology to impact youth.
As a Senior Data Systems Associate, Laetitia Benimana works on managing Educate!’s digital databases across Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya and supports how these systems are interconnected. For Laetitia, this career path was driven by her can-do attitude. “I asked myself, ‘Why not? Why can’t I excel in it?’ I find technology extremely fascinating and very motivating.”
Charity Mbabazi, Senior Product Manager
When Educate! ran its distance learning model in Uganda during the pandemic, Laetitia’s role was critical in managing the USSD system — a communication tool similar to text messaging — which the team used to recruit participants. During recruitment, she organized incoming information to facilitate youth allocation to Mentors leading the program. Laetitia says that this service was outsourced when she first joined Educate!. Through an online course, she learned how to build a USSD system and later applied this knowledge to her work. The system she built continues to be used today across Educate!’s models. It is this kind of experience that Laetitia most enjoys at Educate!. “I find myself learning every day. By collaborating with teammates, we can all grow together.”
Like Laetitia, Charity Mbabazi, our Senior Product Manager, says she has picked up many lessons while at Educate!. Charity’s background was in designing highly complex tech solutions, and she has been fascinated by how powerful Educate!’s low-tech solutions, like mobile phones, can be. According to her, “It’s exciting to see the increased number of youth we can reach and impact using technology.”
Charity also enjoys working with people from various teams to solve problems and optimize efficiency. Currently, she is experimenting with building an Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) system that would make it easier for Mentors to track participant progress. This system will help automate the data entry process, ensuring that reports are submitted faster and more reliably than before.