Episode #15

Carolyn Ekyarisiima wanted to become a doctor to help people. Now she is an IT-Expert training thousands of girls in Tanzania how to use technology to create the world they want to live in.

She founded the organization Apps and Girls. They are teaching girls how to code. And how to use IT and technology to get their voices heard and ideas out into the world. When she founded the NGO in 2014 she was pregnant, today she has four kids and 11 employees. In the last eight years more than 100.000 girls learned about the power of IT with Apps and Girls.

Thez focus on girls and young women from underprivileged backgrounds to reduce the gender gap in IT and empower more change makers in Tanzania and across Africa.

We talk about:

• Her story on how she managed to build Apps and Girls, starting with voluntary teaching sessions in her living room up until now with 11 full time employees and some voluntaries in almost 200 schools in Tanzania and Uganda.
• Best practice example of one of her students: coding against harassment
• How it is still not easy to get funding, but how they do it anyway.
• What Europe could learn from Africa Tecwise.
• How coding is a super power.

Carolyn`s Utopia:
Apps and Girls becoming an Pan-African organization. Offering girls the technology to create different solutions and to have a positive impact on their communities. I see female developed big start-ups creating a better world everywhere because technology is an enabler. You need it in health, in economy in everything.

LINKS
https://www.appsandgirls.com/

@ecarolyne
@appsandgirls

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/magazine/women-coding-computer-programming.html