There is nothing as powerful as a group of single-minded and strong-willed women who have refused to take no for an answer to what they believe in life. These classes of women are unstoppable to any force that tries to limit them. 

Today, women have begun to dominate all fields and industries especially in fields and countries where they have been underrepresented in the past – the tech-industry for example. It is no longer news when we hear the tremendous results of various women in tech.

In Ghana we have Anne Amuzu-Ewoenam a young, self-motivated and vivacious technology entrepreneur who has pitched a tent for herself in the ICT sector and has impacted on the tech industry in Africa. In 2014, Anne was named one of the 10 female tech founders to watch in Africa by Forbes.

According to Anne, “There is no female brain and male brain, we are all persons not just gender. Career and professions don’t have gender. It’s about your ability, not your gender. So, if there is something you can do, you don’t have to look at who is in there. They are human beings just like you.” 

Anne is known as the co-founder of Nandimobile; a company that develops software that enables business organisations to deliver customer support and information via mobile phones.

Nandimobile was formed in 2010 by Anne and two other students from MEST called Michael Dakwa and Edward Amartey-Tagoe. The software company was created to serve technological needs of organizations and businesses in her home country – Ghana. When Anne spoke about the process undergone in establishing Nandimobile, she said “It was a long process. We went through a lot of refinements, so by the time the actual product was out, it was something people wanted. We have been very, very big on getting feedback from our customers since they are the ones going to use it.”

The company made it first step into limelight in 2010, when its maiden product ‘Gripeline’ was said to solve a worldwide problem and was awarded the Best Business at the Rising Talent launch conference in San Francisco. Nandimobile has gone on to win various other awards within and outside Ghana. Anne has also graced panels across several continents.

Anne was also part of the team that developed an app called Keni. Keni helps to give people an easy access to varieties of essential services like banks and ATM’s, fuel stations, health services, pharmacies and shops in Ghana.

She was part of the #IlooklikeanEngineer campaign on social media. The campaign was aimed at bringing gender disparity and sexism in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) to the fore of discussions.

In order to give back to the society, Anne has devoted herself to teach young Ghanaians how to write code.

In 2013, she was nominated for the Annual Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership Programme.

Since creation, man has been in pursuit of making life much easier for inhabitants of the earth. Anne’s creations make it easier for people within and outside Ghana to send information literally with a few taps on a phone. For this reason, Amazons Watch Magazine is delighted to share her story and her dedicated effort in standing up for women in the technology industry and also looking out for the growth of others in order that they might become better versions of themselves.

To every female entrepreneurs Anne says: “Find your passion and what you are good at. Learn and read a lot on it and just do it. Sometimes we over-analyze and it paralyses our ideas. Ideas are nothing if they are not implemented. Ideas and visions are always clearer when you start implementing them.”

Across the globe there are young and resilient personalities in the STEM fields who have been adding values to the STEM industry and impacting on the lives of other people through research, innovations and special initiatives.

In the Middle East, we have Aya Mouallem a young Lebanese university undergraduate who is working to make the world a better place. Aya is the co-founder of All Girls Code, a nonprofit initiative that is helping young women in the Middle East find a footing in STEM.

During the Devex World 2018 in Washington, D.C., Aya shares her story on how her journey in STEM began and how far she had gone in helping fellow women in the Middle East.  An excerpt from Johnson & Johnson.

“I was always a curious kid. I asked way too many questions about how everything works—so much so that my teachers and parents frequently had to look up the answers just to satisfy me. And I was always tinkering with things.

In Arab communities, including in my home country of Lebanon, girls unfortunately are not encouraged to do these things—they are only expected to play with dolls. Thankfully, my parents encouraged my tinkering skills.

At a young age, I was fixing PCs and smartphones, and began to learn coding on my own. In high school, a friend and I taught ourselves Python—a type of computer programming language—and used it to create a program that designed spiral staircases. The project ended up winning all the science fairs we participated in.

Naturally, I decided to pursue computer engineering when I enrolled in the American University of Beirut in 2016. In my first software engineering class, I was one of two girls in a lab with more than 20 students. As I moved up in my degree, the overall number of girls decreased even more. I never felt disrespected or underestimated because of that gender disparity, but I was troubled by it.

One day, when a female friend of mine did not do well on an exam, she laughed and said, ‘Aya, I shouldn’t worry about my grade. I can always get married, have kids and stay at home!’

I was shocked because I was not raised that way. But soon, I heard this opinion echoed by several other young women at school. I also came to know women who transferred out of computer engineering because they were disheartened by how few females they saw in the field. That is when I realized just how much a role society plays in why girls tend to avoid the engineering field, or join it only to leave before they have made their mark—and it frustrated me.

I reached my breaking point when an older family friend questioned my choice of major by saying that ‘females cannot do that type of complex math.’ That comment struck me as wrong on so many levels. But, I thought: If I cannot correct the archaic mentalities of many of the older generation, I can at least help the next.

That is when I decided that I would work to get young girls interested in STEM and help them feel confident in their abilities, so if they decided to pursue STEM fields, they would not feel pressured to drop out because of societal expectations and stereotypes.

I talked to my classmate Maya Moussa about my plans to start an initiative around these ideas, and together in March 2017, we founded All Girls Code, which provides free, hands-on coding experience and technology workshops to girls up to the age of 18 in Lebanon.

The Impact of All Girls Code—All the Way to Google

We have been around for a year now, and in that time, 100 girls have been introduced to STEM in an empowering environment, taken crash courses in leadership training, participated in a hackathon, built websites and apps, and learned and applied university-level algorithms. I am very proud to say that 90% of the girls who have attended All Girls Code programs—and applied to universities—have chosen to pursue STEM fields.

I am also proud that all of our work so far has been done by volunteers on zero budget. At times, between other university students and the parents of participants, we have had as many as 100 people helping us out. We host our events at the university Maya and I attend, so we do not pay to reserve a place. The computer science and engineering departments at our school have also been very helpful and supportive, installing any additional software we may need.

All of this resourcefulness has paid off.

We were honored by Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri when he announced All Girls Code as a partner in his Summer of Innovation Program, which celebrated activities in the areas of innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity.

Maya and I were chosen as Women Techmakers by Google because of our work to encourage females to pursue tech fields, and I was announced as a Stanford she++ Ambassador, and consequently attended the she++ Gala in Silicon Valley, which celebrates diversity in technology.

I mention all of this because I want to set an example for all girls. I want them to know that they can change the world if they set their minds to it.

In the next year, Maya and I plan to collaborate with tech companies to further expand All Girls Code. We have funding from Stanford she++, which we will use to buy parts for hands-on robotics workshops. We plan to carry on with our work for free so that everyone can participate, including refugees, who we welcomed at our last event.

We are also currently working on developing a board for the initiative, since Maya and I will be spending more time abroad soon, and we want to be sure that those who take over the day-to-day running of the program will be ready for the challenge.

There is always a space for a go-getter, Aya’s story has inspired and push many young girls into pursuing their dreams.

Despite the patriarchal nature of most Middle East countries, women from the region have been able to carve a niche for themselves in almost all facets of life.

Among these women is Iba Masood, a successful woman in STEM. Iba is a Pakistani woman born and raised in the United Arab Emirates. She is the co-founder and CEO of a project-planning and recruiting company called Tara AI.

Iba is a hardworking and purpose-driven woman, who currently heads the evolution of TARA Intelligence Inc. in Silicon Valley. Her company has recently raised $3 million in new seed funding from YCombinator, Moment Ventures, GSV and others. Prestigious organisations like; Ford, Cisco and Orange Telecom are using artificial intelligence from Tara AI to find top coders for freelance software projects.

She was thirteen-years-old when she bore the dream that births her present status. She had always wanted to own a tech-related company in the United States, one that would come to being with her ignition, and grow to become a huge, useful, successful, and resourceful to the technology industry.

In pursuit of this dream, she went on to study and at the age of nineteen, Iba gained a Bachelor’s in Finance and was the top of her class. Unfortunately, she had graduated at a time when the world was hit with global economic recession. Despite her good grades, getting hired was a huge problem for Iba, so she was unemployed for a long time. However, she stayed focused and continued to apply jobs while looking out for opportunities to begin creating the future she had dreamt of. 

Finally, her dedicated efforts began to bear fruits when she was accepted into a trainee program at McKinsey which paved the way for her new role at GE. Although on getting to GE she was offered a very low salary, she was not perturbed, rather, finding herself in a job that pushed her towards her career extremely challenged her. The job exposed her career instability, which made her realized that she needed to grow and gain capability in order to support herself financially, do work that was rewarding to her, and have the potential for growth and development in her future.

So she stayed focused in gaining stability which was her topmost priority at the time and it pushed her to take premeditated risks to attain her goals. She foresaw the beauty in taking risks because of the potential reward that it could bring. She had resolved that if she was not getting what she expected she would go the extra mile to get to her dreams.

Iba founded her first company at age 21, which started out as a career platform for graduates to find jobs. At its inception, the platform was dedicated to catering for hundreds of Enterprise customers in the Middle East. She had always wanted to create a platform that would yield profit, jobs, and many more useful tools and products for the technology industry. Iba belived in herself that she had something that would be an advantage to the tech industry. She wanted to create something that had even more potential, and her previous success boosted her confidence to move forward.

Iba first came to the US on a visit visa and eventually stayed with the pull of her latest dream and entrepreneurial endeavor called TARA. She soon realized that her preconceived faultless view of the U.S.’s technology sector was not so true to reality. She had thought that the industry was a merit-based space in which everyone had a fair and equal shot. However, contrary to her perception she realized that being a woman and/or a person of color in the start-up world means it may be more challenging for you to get funding, or get opportunities for starting out/growth that others may get more easily. Having lived/worked in multiple countries/cultures, Iba resolved that the US has a long way to go in improving opportunity for minority groups.

Facing these challenges, Iba’s resolve was strengthened that the platform she was working on, TARA.AI, was a tool with which she could make positive and required impact in the industry. TARA’s Intelligence is used by software companies to predict and build an early version of their product. This allows a company to predict the tasks they will have to accomplish, and the milestones they will have to reach in order to successfully execute launching a new product.

A part of her journey that Iba is very proud of is having TARA become a YCombinator company. Iba first applied to YC at 17, and was not accepted. When she was 26, she gave it another shot but this time she was intimidated, feeling that as someone without an ivy league degree and as a Silicon Valley outsider, she may not get accepted. But despite the very real fear, she applied anyway – and not only got an interview, she also got the job.

She often tells her team that no woman is an island. Learn to build a network of friends, partnerships, mentors, peers, advisors, so you never feel that you are working alone. A solid way to ensure consistent development and growth is to surround yourself with a network of people who will constantly push you to grow, look at problems from different angles, and above all, keep believing in your innate ability. 

Her words to other women: At every stage of the process (even when you’ve seen years of success), surround yourself with people who are smarter than you – absorb their wisdom to ensure broadened understanding, and ever-increasing knowledge toward happiness and success.