Even on an impressive list of women doing ground-breaking work in the areas of science, technology and innovation for development and change in East Africa, Dr. Dorothy Okello’s name and achievements still stand out.
A Ugandan engineer, academic, and activist, Dr. Okello has made it her life’s work to increase the inclusion and participation of women in using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to address development challenges in Uganda.
She is the founder of Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET), a platform with a mission to promote and support the use of information and communication technologies by women and women organizations in Uganda. WOUGNET works to create a society in which women are empowered through the use of ICTs for sustainable development.
Dr. Okello holds a B.Sc. in Engineering (Electrical - First Class Hons.) from Makerere University, the first woman to graduate with a first class in the male-dominated Electrical Engineering department at her university at the time. She also has a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Kansas, United States (Fulbright Scholar), and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from McGill University, Montreal, Canada (Canadian Commonwealth Scholarship Recipient). She is the immediate past president of the Uganda Institution of Professional Engineers (UIPE), the first woman to hold the position and has served on the UIPE Council since 2010. She is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and served on the 2018 IEEE Ad Hoc Committee on Activities in Africa (AHCAA). She has also served as a Commissioner and an Interim Chairperson with Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), where she also served as Chairperson for the Rural Communications Development Fund (RCDF). She is also an Adjunct Member of Faculty at the Institute of Technology in Carlow, Ireland.
From 2008-2009, she was a Member of the Strategy Council for the United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development. Dr. Okello worked as an Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Makerere University and as a Lecturer in College of Engineering, Design, Art and Technology (CEDAT) from 1998-2013, where she taught courses on Information and Communication Technology, Telecommunication Systems and Wireless Propagation. She became a Senior lecturer at Makerere University in May 2013.
She is presently the Dean, School of Engineering, College of Engineering, Design, Art and Technology (CEDAT), Makerere University where she is also a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She is a Researcher with netLabs!UG, a research center within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering that seeks to be a leader in collaborative research, development and solutions on innovative telecommunication and networking technologies with a goal to strengthen the innovation ecosystem in Uganda and across East Africa.
In addition, she is the Director of Innovation, ResilientAfrica Network (RAN) hosted by Makerere University. Supported by USAID, RAN is a multi-disciplinary network of 18 Sub-Saharan African universities that seek to identify, develop and scale innovative solutions in science and technology to strengthen the resilience of African communities.
Dr. Okello has been recognized with a number of international and national awards over the years including as a ‘Top ICT Woman – Uganda ICT Excellence Awards 2009’ organized by the Uganda ICT Forum. She has been featured in 12 Top Technology People in East Africa who are technologists with a social twist by Enterprise Technology Magazine, September 2012. She received the Women Achievers Award in 2012 for enhancing women’s empowerment through Science & Technology. In 2013, she became Africa’s first-ever Digital Woman of the Year, an award given to her at the Africa ICT Days gala ceremony for the Digital Woman Award finalists that took place in Yaoundé, Cameroon. In 2014, she was selected as a Vital Voices Fellow for distinguished emerging and established women leaders who promote women and girls’ progress.
Why TechHer Loves Her:
In addition to being activist in the area of getting more women engaged in the information society, science and technology for development, Dr. Okello has and continues to break through the glass ceiling in male dominated spaces. She continually sets the standard for what women working in science and technology in Africa can achieve.
Kehinde Oni is a world class full stacker developer and computer programmer with exceptional skill in JavaScript and Ruby on Rails. Her resume includes work with some of the biggest tech companies in the world, including Microsoft and Atlas.
She is a graduate of the University of Ilorin with a degree in Mathematics.
In 2010, Kehinde was an Exchange Programme Intern at AIESEC Ghana where she volunteered for a period of 1 month. She was part of a team that organized a workshop themed, "Project YES (Young Entrepreneurs)" was aimed at empowering undergraduates in tertiary institutions.
In April 2015, she worked with other team members to develop a Civic Graph, an open source, crowdsourced knowledge base and data visualization project. It aims to map the civic tech community players and connections -- their types, locations and levels of influence in an interactive, intuitive, and modern way.
In July 2015, she worked on a project called Executer. Executer is a mobile App that uses scheduled information from your Google Calendar to figure out where you are and where you need to be at any point in time. It then helps you to schedule an Uber pick up with enough time for you to make it to your next appointment just in time.
From August 2015-Dec 2016, Kehinde served as the Vice President for SheLovesCode. SheLovesCode is an initiative of the female developers working at Andela. It was born out of the apparent gender gap in Andela and the tech world generally.
She is a member of AIESEC. Kehinde eagerly desires to launch her start up with the intent to empower Nigerian children to follow career paths of their own choosing.
She currently works as a Software Developer at Andela.
Why TechHer Loves Her:
Kehinde is smart, intelligent and self- motivated. Thriving in technology can sometimes be a bit difficult for women in Africa but she has made a name for herself in the tech space.
Aisha Bello is a systems engineer, tech enthusiast and acclaimed ‘Pythonista’ with a passion to help other girls utilize the immense, unexploited opportunities in Technology.
She is a member of Pyladies, an international mentorship group which focuses on helping more women become active participants in the Python open-source community. She is also an organizer for DjangoGirls in Africa. Django Girl is a non-profit organization that empowers and helps women by organizing free, one-day programming workshops by providing tools, resources and support. She has helped co-organize and support a number of Django Girls workshops in Namibia and Nigeria.
She also serves as vice-chair for the Python Nigeria community. She is enthusiastic about the Python community and has a strong desire for social change, women’s tech education and empowerment in Africa.
She is a graduate of Bells University of Technology, after which she furthered her education in Information Technology from Cardiff Metropolitan University. She is a certified Cisco Networking Associate.
Miss Bello worked as a Software Development Intern from February 2012 - August 2012 at CBC EMEA. While working with them, she validated data to ensure the quality, validity and accuracy of content and worked extensively with development teams, investigating and correcting software bugs and deficiencies based on the testing results.
Between June 2014 and Jan 2015, she worked as a Technical sales representative at Complete Digital Limited in Lagos where she proffered recovery solutions and enterprise wireless networks solutions to partners and vendors. She also designed, supervised, monitored and gathered technical content for the company’s e-Commerce Website.
In 2015, she volunteered with Djangogirls and organized Django Girls Windhoek and Django Girls Lagos in 2016.
Aisha has received several honors and awards including the 2016 Malcolm Tredinnick Memorial Prize from Django Software Foundation.
Aisha currently works with Cisco as an Associate System Engineer with the responsibilities of covering routing and switching. She also provides pre-sales technical support for Cisco Sales teams and partners.
Why TechHerLoves Her:
Aisha’s vibrancy and enthusiasm are highly contagious! She has contributed greatly to the tech community by giving back to other women who are trying to get a foot in the Tech space. Well done Aisha!
Once ranked no. 4 on Github’s list of best programmers in the country, Olubukola Makinwa - self-taught programmer and developer extraordinaire - is in a class of her own.
Formerly a technical team lead & lead facilitator at Andela, Olubukola is a programmer/full stack developer fascinated about the web and its technologies. She wrote her first programming language (Java) as an undergraduate.
She graduated with a first class degree from the University of Babcock. She is a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist and also has certifications from the Neuroscience of Learning and the App Evolution with Swift.
From 2016-2018, Olubukola worked with Andela as the Lead Facilitator and Technical Team Lead. Before that, she was the lead developer at Swap Space in 2015, a company that delivers IT solutions and services. She has also worked as a technical support for GigaLayer.com and was a Web Developer at ConnectNigeria.com. She worked on projects like Online Digital Library, CNV Framework, Converg (Beta Version) a web-based platform that helps coders connect, support and learn from each other in real time.
Some of her awards include Best Graduating Student, Department of Computer Science with the Highest CGPA and also from the School of Computing and Engineering Science.
She currently works as a software engineer at Contentful, a German based company.
Why TechHerLoves Her
Olubukola is a self-taught programmer who rose to become one of the best in the country. Her brilliance, passion for the science of learning and her conviction that one can learn anything motivates us to take on challenges.
About Her:
Ire hails from Ogun state. She was born into the family of Late Mr Tayo and Mrs Olunfunlola Aderinokun. Ire had a bit of career crisis which made her switch from several educational background and finally decided to be a professional Software developer and User Interface designer. Here’s more on the switch in her educational background:
She is currently the Head of Designs and Tech at Big Cabal Media, the publishers of online publications such as TechCabal and Zikoko. Ire has designed and worked on several open source side projects as a freelancer.
Her Work:
Ire has designed and worked on several open source side projects at TechCabal as a freelancer and an employee.
She designed the website http://www.studioofmode.com/ for Studio of Mode; a company that creates space for the voice of creativity with several skills that can be clearly understood.
Miss Aderinokun created an App called Formback; a hackable sass -based form reset for forms.
She designed “Designers News for Pebble"; an application for the pebble smartwatch that displays the top and recent stories from Designer News.
One of Aderinokun project is Instachrome; an extension for Google Chrome that displays Instagram posts from a tag of your choice which has over 200 active users.
She created a blog called "Bits of Code" for self-taught web developers. The blog was geared when she was struggling to get clients.
A fun bot for slacks that mimics Dj Khaleed called 'Khaleed Bot' was featured on ProductHunt.
She designed a free theme marketplace for ghost blogging platform called Open Writer. It has been featured in a list of superb Free and Premium Ghost Themes.
Miss Ire designed the Unofficial 'canIuse Embed'; which is an embedded widget to display updates from www.caniuse.com which displays feature support data for multiple versions of the major browsers such as Chrome, Firefox etc.
Some of her favorites works are Le Retail, Bode Agusto, and Supper Club among others.
Why TechHer Loves Her:
We are inspired by her learning skills on web development and user interface. It shows her passion towards technology. Her switch in career was more about confidence in her abilities. This would inspire women who think they are not capable of doing something different from what they studied in school or what seem comfortable to them.
