NIGERIA WOMEN ARE CHANGING THE FACE OF TECH
Female
Developers Are Emerging as Influential Forces in the Country’s Booming
Technology Sector – But the Stigma Persists That Computing Is A ‘Male Industry
The Nigerian
tech scene is booming. Last year, Lagos-based startup Andela received $24m (£18.5m) in funding from
Mark Zuckerberg. In 2015, financial technology startup Pay stack –
one of the first Nigerian tech companies to be accepted into renowned
California-based startup accelerator Y Combinator – secured approximately
$1.3m in seed investment from international investors.
Within this growth, women
are emerging as influential forces, and changing the face of technology
in Africa, especially in the fields of
agricultural and financial tech. This is despite the fact that, as recently as
a decade ago, women were grossly underrepresented in and excluded from the
industries they are now helping to shape.
“I think those who are
joining the tech world today have an easier path to tread,” says Nnenna
Nwakanma, a Nigerian activist for accessible internet. “There were situations
where people would refuse to recognise my authority, but would patronise or
objectify me, or refuse to fulfil contracts they had willingly entered into –
all because of my gender.” Despite this, Nwakanma co-founded the Free Software and OpenSource Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) and is now a senior
policy manager for the World Wide Web Foundation, where she
supports digital equality and promotes the rights of Nigerian women online.
The negative attitude
towards women’s involvement in science, technology, engineering and mathematics
(Stem) is starting to change, thanks partly to initiatives such as the Stem
outreach and mentoring programmes established by the Working to Advance Science
and Technology Education for African Women (WAAW) Foundation, which operates in
11 countries. There is also Intel’s programme She Will Connect Africa, which has trained
more than 150,000 women in Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya in digital literacy
since it launched in 2013.
The demand for tech
talent is now such that it cannot be met by men alone. Rapid digitalisation in Nigeria is
heavily concentrated in the country’s metropolitan megacity, Lagos. Here, the
startup culture flourishes, while big business have moved in: in 2015, global
tech supplier Bosch opened a subsidiary in Ikeja, the capital of Lagos region,
and Microsoft has an office in the affluent Lagos neighbourhood of Ikoyi.
Ire Aderinokun – the
author of web development blog bitsofco.de, a front-end developer and
Nigeria’s first female Google Developer Expert – says her love
of tech started as a hobby. “I used to play an online game called Neopets,
which had some HTML capabilities. From there, I got really interested and
continued to learn more.” But, despite Aderinokun’s enthusiasm, her interest
was not always encouraged. “It’s definitely not what society expected of me. I
studied psychology for my undergraduate and law for my master’s. When I said I
wanted to pursue this, there were many people who told me not to.
Rukayat Sadiq, a software
engineer and a technical team leader at Andela, also faced opposition. She
chose to study electrical engineering – a subject in which a class of 150
students might include only 15 women – to the surprise of friends and family,
who had expected her to become a doctor.
While women entering and
participating equally in the labour market is commonplace in Nigeria, computing
and engineering are still industries dominated heavily by men. But many women
who work in the tech industry are keen to offer support to those coming up.
Aderinokun, for example, is funding full scholarships to five women for online
programming “nanodegrees”.
These qualifications do not
guarantee employment, but they give those who have earned them a distinct
advantage in the workplace and are endorsed by top employers, including Google,
AT&T and Amazon. Sadiq also spends time “teaching and mentoring newbies”.
“Removing the stigma and
assumption that tech is only supposed to be for men is necessary, and I think
we need to start from as early in children’s lives as possible,” says
Aderinokun. “We should work towards eliminating negative statements and
mindsets that perpetuate the myth that women can’t be involved in Stem.”
It is hopeful that we
will one day get to a point where tech-related fields are level playing grounds
for both sexes.
It is a challenge that
continues around the globe, but it is one Nigeria is
well equipped to handle.
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