Ada Nduka Oyom
Founder of She Code Africa
The Hope Brigade Nigeria, 2021
Empowering the girl child with skills to level up, highlighting their untold success stories to the rest of the world, will continue to prove one of the fastest ways to achieving gender equality in the spheres we seek across the world. Just like the popular proverb says “Train a girl child and you train the world”, it takes one girl at a time.
Ada is the Founder of She Code Africa (SCA), a non-profit organisation focused on empowering young girls and women across Africa through technical skills. She founded SCA in 2016 and has since impacted over 5000 women members across 15 African countries with her team, while championing gender diversity in tech through it. Her role at She Code Africa has lead her team to creating several learning & career growth initiatives for women including the quarterly Mentorship Program targeted at connecting experienced devs and beginners/intermediates for a three-month intensive learning, annual one-month Summer code camp (for secondary school girls) etc while growing the community’s presence to 30 chapters across Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Rwanda and Cameroon with the aim of reaching more girls and women in rural settlements. She’s also championed impactful partnership with several organisations including her co-founded organisation; Open Source community Africa, where a partnership runs to create more gender diversity in the open source field across Africa, through the Women of OSCA initiative. Her strides in advocating for more gender diversity in tech and building developer communities has seen her being awarded as one of Ytech 100 honourees by the Future awards Africa 2019, Top 50 TechWomen of Lagos by TechCabal and most recently awarded as the winner of the role model award category in the Booking.com Tech Playmaker awards 2020.