As a microbiology undergraduate at the University of Nigeria, Ada Nduka Oyom stumbled into tech, grew to love it, and has since built a career in the sector. In 2016, she launched She Code Africa, where she is solving two major challenges as it pertains to talent: encouraging more women into the industry through training and mentoring, and showing women who have no technical background that there is a seat for them at the table. Oyom tells AMAKA why a safe space in tech, where women can learn, fail and get back on track matters. 

During her second year at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), Oyom saw an advertisement for a tech event organised by a now-defunct Google Student Club geared at selecting students to map the university campus. “It was close to my faculty building so I could skip an hour from class, attend the event and come back,” says Oyom. “The event really piqued my interest.” Prior to this encounter, her interest in tech had been a youthful curiosity and preoccupation with gadgets because friends and family would often seek her advice on what to buy. 

In the classroom where the event was held, Oyom made two very critical observations that inspired the creation of She Code Africa (SCA) years later: only a handful of female students were present amongst a sea of their male contemporaries and she was the only student who had joined the event from a non-computer science or engineering faculty. SCA is a female-led, non-profit trying to bridge the gender disparity in Africa’s technology ecosystem through technical training and mentoring. At the centre of its focus, however, are women from non-tech backgrounds who are unsure if they have a place in Africa’s booming technology industry or are looking to branch into new focus areas.

Addressing gender disparity in African tech

The campus mapping project introduced Oyom to the tech community at UNN. She also joined the campus Google Developer Group—which evolved from the Google Student Club—and launched UNN’s first Women Techmakers programme together with her team to encourage more female students to get involved. In her final year she began learning how to code. Following her graduation and interaction with more Google Developer Groups outside Nsukka, it began to sink in just how troubling the gender disparity in tech was.

While there has been some improvement in bringing diversity and inclusion to the workplace in Africa’s tech sector, the realities still look grim. According to McKinsey’s 2016 Women Matter Africa report, just 33 percent of senior managers and 16 percent of board members in the telecoms, media and technology industries in Africa were women. In 2020, a survey for TechCabal’s Women in Tech report , revealed that 65 percent of female university students said they opted for STEM fields of their own volition, however, less than 50 percent said they see themselves long-term in the industry. 

The hurdles of inclusivity in the industry include a number of cultural and technical issues that dissuade women from pursuing careers in tech, or when they do, affecting how long and impactful their careers are. At SCA, Oyom and her core team of 26, as well as volunteers are addressing both technical and non-technical aspects of these challenges.“

We started out with one-day events because back then, it was just me,” says Oyom, adding that at the time, she was also trying to build her own career in the industry. After SCA’s first major event—a bootcamp that ran for two consecutive weeks—requests for mentoring surged and a lasting community was created. In 2019, Oyom and her team test-ran SCA’s first mentoring programme and following its success, the She Code Africa Mentoring initiative was born. It has since become a regular fixture, with four quarterly cohorts each year. “It’s three months of intense daily learning and weekly meetings with mentors,” Oyom explains. “We have POCs (persons of contact) from SCA who are positioned within mentoring groups to ensure that participants are dedicated to what they are learning and that mentors are playing their own role.” The programme explores a diverse range of focus areas in tech from programming to design and Open Source which Oyom is passionate about. “When you are looking for someone in cloud engineering [for instance], you’ll find at least ten women within our community who fit the bill.”

Women-focused programmes tend to favour post-tertiary or tertiary levels, as a result SCA believes it is important to begin early to teach and show girls that tech is not male-centric and everyone has a role to play in the industry. Hence, in addition to its mentoring initiative, SCA also organises Summer Code Camp, designed for high school girls between August and September every year. 

Until 2020, Oyom self-funded the organisation’s activities but with its footprints expanding across the continent, SCA now welcomes goodwill donations alongside partners like Deimos Cloud, who sponsor specific programmes. 

Every woman is welcome here

Oyom encourages women in the community to explore belonging to other non gender-focused communities, nevertheless, she stresses that the benefit of a female-only community to a woman’s career is unparalleled. For one, it is a safe space that encourages expression, failing and getting back up without shame or fear of reproach. “Not every woman is lucky enough to grow up in an environment where she is confident,” says Oyom. As the only daughter growing up in a household of men, Oyom says she has always found it easy to integrate into male-dominated spaces. However, she is cognisant that the experience can be wildly different for women entering an entirely new field and going through the often terrifying stages of developing a new skill. “

The beauty of SCA is the fact that there is no prerequisite for you to join,” says Adedoyin Adeyemi, a pharmacology graduate, who made the life-changing move into tech when she started learning to code during lockdown in 2020. Adeyemi adds that seeing other women from medical backgrounds like her at SCA’s events was encouraging. 

Adeyemi’s journey into the tech sector started on freeCodeCamp, a platform that teaches how to code at no cost, where she began with responsive web design. After some additional database and programming courses on LinkedIn Learning, Adeyemi returned to freeCodeCamp to learn JavaScript. It was there that she first learned about SCA, and joined its frontend development channel on Slack. When the organisation announced a three-month cloud engineering and DevOps mentoring program—the first cohort focused on cloud technology—she applied and was accepted. When the three month programme ended, and with the aid of a scholarship, Adeyemi embarked on a Udacity Cloud Engineering Nanodegree course. It is Adeyemi’s hope that this path will stand her in good stead within the tech sector, so she can build a strong career.

Adeyemi is not the only one SCA’s work has had a profound impact on. Oluwatomisin Lalude was also in the same cohort. Although she had worked for about two years in the tech sector, she was looking to switch focus areas out of boredom and wanted to venture into DevOps and cloud computing. “I was so excited,” Lalude says upon learning about SCA’s programme. “The opportunity was so timely for me so I jumped on it.” She was offered an internship at Deimos Cloud, the cloud technology company that sponsored the mentorship programme. She would go on to work with them as a Site Reliability Engineer until July this year. She currently works in the same capacity at Rova.

For Ruth Ikegah, who graduated from the University of Port Harcourt with a degree in Microbiology, SCA’s mentoring programme was a career-defining experience. For her first role in the industry, Ikegah would go on to work as a technical content marketing manager at Animalz, a New York-based content marketing company for the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry. 

As a women-only community, Lalude says not only do Oyom and her team understand the challenges women face in the tech community but also in the larger society, and they approach their work at SCA from this position. Additionally, women meeting others who are in exactly the same or similar circumstances, and reaching towards similar goals is what makes women-only communities like SCA so invaluable to her career. In her very first tech role as a junior content developer, Lalude says she had a male colleague who was automatically assigned more tasks by their superiors, fuelling her feelings of imposter syndrome. “Community has been my biggest support,” she adds.

Towards equal representation in African tech

Oyom says the ecosystem on the continent is still scratching the surface both in welcoming and retaining female talent. “For one, a lot of the tech companies on the continent are still at their very early stages,” she says. This means that early preoccupations revolve around building product(s) or fundraising with inclusion often taking a backseat. On the other hand, the few who have been in existence for long tend to want to maintain the status quo. If longstanding gender distribution on their teams has worked for so long, why fix what isn’t broken? With retention, the cultural expectations of women as homemakers can adversely affect career growth long term particularly in organisations where inclusivity is not a priority and enabling environments are lacking. Pay gaps, sexual harassment and assault are also deterrents that can influence women’s longevity in the industry. While progress is happening albeit slowly, there’s still a lot of work to be done. As the lone or one of a handful of women in most rooms, Ikeagah and Lalude echo this. “I don’t like being the only female in a room and companies need to start employing more women in their tech departments,” Lalude says. 

In addition to running SCA and a day job as Google’s Ecosystem Community Manager for Sub-Saharan Africa, Oyom is involved in a number of other communities including Open Source Community Africa which she co-founded. Her drive, she says, comes from a genuine interest in helping women, particularly transplants, succeed in the technology industry. “I was once that second year girl who had no idea what she was doing in that classroom with her bag clutched to her chest and a phone in her hand but people were willing to help her and I want to pass it on.”