She’s done it again !

Our Vice President, Linda Kamau, is one of the recipients of this year’s Student Rebuild Awards, featuring Half the Sky movement. Half the Sky Movement has partnered with Students Rebuild, a collaborative initiative of the Bezos Family Foundation that mobilizes young people worldwide to connect, learn and take collective action on critical global issues.

Read Linda’s winning application story here.

In its inaugural year, the Students Rebuild Awards aims to fuel global awareness and anti-oppression efforts by elevating the game changers who are working to improve the lives of young people in their communities.
Linda is one of five young women who are being recognized and celebrated for their efforts in trying to improve life condition for women and girls in their communities and countries. Each winner will receive a $10,000 prize to amplify her efforts.  Linda intends to use this award towards continued inspiration and encouragement of African women in technology through the AkiraChix training program.

Congrats Linda, keep doing us proud!

We are all aware that career paths are chosen, or at least heavily decided upon on completion of High School in Kenya. This is one of the reasons why AkiraChix has embarked on mentoring young girls in high school through visits, and bootcamps during school holidays, in line with its vision of creating a successful force of women in technology

This month, on 27th April 2013, AkiraChix will be hosting a Girls in ICT day event, aiming at exposing these young ladies to some of the career opportunities available to them in the tech industry. They will get to interact with girls who have benefited from the mentorship program in the past, as well as women working in the tech industry, both locally and globally. This event(in partnership with Google Kenya and ITU, who are the brains behind the Girls in ICT initiative) will be held at the iHub on 27th April 2013, between 9 a.m and 4.30 p.m.

Designed by AkiraChix Training programme Beneficiary, Fridah Oyaro

We will continue to provide updates as we get closer to the day of the event.

If you have a sister/friend in high school who you think would benefit or would like to know how you can participate or help make this event a big hit, feel free to get in touch with us via info@akirachix.com for further information.

This year’s Mobile Garage Student’s Exhibition will be held on May 18 at the iHub Nairobi starting from 9:00 a.m.- 4:00 p.m. On this day students from universities and colleges all over Kenya will showcase their mobile applications and compete for the three top prizes. The theme of the event is ‘Solutions for the Next Billion mobile users’. Africa has 644 million subscribers (approximately 11% of the global total) and this has powered a social and economic revolution. As more people get access to mobile phones and Internet penetration increases they will need applications and services to serve their need. African developers are well positioned to come up with applications for this new mobile user and serve the existing ones in new ways. This Mobile App Showcase introduces the next generation of developers and tech-entrepreneurs.

In the course of the event we shall host a panel of entrepreneurs in a session dubbed ‘FailTalk’. During this session tech- entrepreneurs will talk of their failure stories and what they learnt from them. This is a platform where the students can hear of real entrepreneurship and the challenges in the journey. They will have an opportunity to ask the entrepreneurs how they overcame their challenges. Samsung, Google and the iHub sponsor this year’s event. To submit your application  fill this form. Deadline for applications is April 30^th.

Participants at last year's event

After the launch, the students embarked on a hackathon competition, facilitated by the Akirachix team. The International Women’s hackathon competition, a first of its kind, aimed at supporting and piloting a ground up crowd sourcing effort to empower young women leaders in computer science to support more young women across university campuses around the world to become producers of future innovations in technology. The hackathon also focused on ensuring that every woman had a fun safe environment in which to explore computing and hence solve challenges in the world today.  The students were expected to choose from a variety of challenges ranging from using the internet to protect women from human trafficking to coding apps for sports, fitness and athletics. The final submission for the challenges ranged from March – June 2013. The winning team will receive a cash award, a trip to Seattle in the US among other amazing prizes.  The Akirachix team continues to offer guidance and advice to the students.

Some Participants brainstorming during the Hackathon session

We congratulate the ACM-W team!