Women in Tech: Building Africa’s Digital Future, Together | Somo Tech Literacy Centre (STLC)
Somo Tech Literacy Centre (STLC), formerly SomoTech Africa. Women are building products, founding companies and shaping Africa’s digital future. Yet gaps...
Author: Grace Wema
By Grace | For Somiqo Hub
Not long ago, a woman opening a laptop for the first time in a Nairobi settlement, learning to code between shifts, would have seemed like an outlier. Today, she is part of a wider pattern. Across Africa and the world, women are entering technology in greater numbers than ever before, building products, founding companies and shaping the systems that run modern economies.
Yet the story of women in tech is not simply about rising participation. It is also about a widening gap between visibility and power, representation and resources, promise and progress. Understanding that gap, and the efforts underway to close it, is essential to imagining a digital future built by everyone.
The global picture: participation without equal power
Globally, progress is steady but slow. Women now hold roughly a quarter to a third of technology roles worldwide, depending on how the sector is measured. They make up around 35% of the broader STEM workforce, despite being close to half of all employed adults.
The gap widens further along the pipeline. Women earn about a fifth of computer science degrees in some markets. Their share shrinks again at leadership level, where they occupy well under a fifth of technical C-suite and CTO positions at major companies.
In frontier fields, the picture is starker still. Women hold roughly a fifth of artificial intelligence roles globally and a similar share of cybersecurity positions, even as both fields grow rapidly and set the terms for tomorrow’s economy.
Africa and Kenya: a striking paradox
Africa mirrors, and in places sharpens, this global pattern. The continent’s developer community is expanding faster than almost any other region, yet women remain a minority within it.
In Kenya, a country whose mobile-money revolution was itself driven in large part by women traders and early adopters, fewer than three in ten ICT roles are held by women. Women also account for under a third of graduates in ICT-related fields.
Digital access tells a related story. National data shows internet usage among women trailing men by five to six percentage points. That gap narrows among urban youth but widens sharply in rural areas.
The paradox is striking. Kenyan women dominate entrepreneurship, owning close to half of the country’s micro and small enterprises, yet remain scarce in the technical roles and boardrooms that decide how digital tools are built.
At a glance
~27% of global tech roles held by women
<30% of ICT roles in Kenya held by women
~22% of AI roles held by women worldwide
Where the barriers begin
The barriers women face in tech are structural as much as personal. Education is the first bottleneck. Girls are steered away from physics, mathematics and computing early, often through subtle cues that these subjects are "hard" or unfeminine. In many African contexts, under-resourced schools, few female STEM teachers and limited digital infrastructure outside major cities compound the problem.
Those who enter the field then face workplace cultures that were not built with them in mind. Surveys of women in tech consistently describe a male-dominated "bro culture," limited access to sponsorship and mentorship, and promotion tracks that favour patterns of visibility more common among men.
The result is a leaky pipeline. A large share of women leave technical roles within five to seven years of starting, often citing a lack of mentorship and unclear paths to leadership as the deciding factor. They leave well before reaching the seniority needed to change the culture from within.
More founders, less funding
For women who choose to build rather than be hired, funding disparities compound the problem. Across Africa, startups with at least one female co-founder now make up a growing share of the venture pipeline. Yet the capital flowing to them has moved in the opposite direction.
Recent industry data shows female-founded African startups capturing under 10% of total equity funding, and in the toughest years, under 1%, even as overall investment on the continent rebounds. Female CEOs fare worse still, often securing only a few percentage points of total capital raised in a given year.
Investors describe this as a "pipeline problem," but researchers who track the data disagree. Representation among founders has risen for several years running, while the share of capital has fallen. This suggests the barrier sits with who gets funded, not who is building.
The pressures beyond the workplace
Socio-economic and cultural obstacles sit beneath both these dynamics. Unpaid care responsibilities fall disproportionately on women, limiting the time available for the long hours that tech careers and startups often demand.
Cultural expectations in many communities still frame technology and engineering as male domains. This discourages girls from pursuing them and discourages families from investing scarce school fees in a daughter’s technical education over a son’s.
Without visible women in senior technical roles, the cycle repeats. Girls who cannot see themselves reflected in the field struggle to imagine a future within it.
Progress and new routes into tech
Despite these barriers, the picture is changing. The share of African startups with a female co-founder has climbed for several consecutive years. Corporate promotion rates for women in tech have also risen sharply worldwide over the past half-decade. These changes are evidence that deliberate policy and workplace commitments do move the numbers.
New career pathways are opening beyond the traditional software-engineer track. Product management, UX and design, data analysis, digital marketing and cybersecurity all offer entry points that draw on a wider range of educational backgrounds. They give women who did not follow a conventional STEM route a way into the sector.
The rise of remote and hybrid work has also quietly reshaped opportunity. Women who might once have left the workforce entirely after starting a family can now remain in technical roles, work across time zones for global employers, or run distributed teams from home. This eases one of the structural pressures that historically pushed women out of tech mid-career.
Meanwhile, growth sectors within Africa’s digital economy, from fintech and health-tech to climate-tech and agritech, are young enough for women entering now to help define their norms and leadership from the outset. Rather than working to reform cultures that are already decades old, women can help shape them as they grow.
The financial case for inclusion
There is a financial case for optimism too. Research consistently finds that companies with more gender-diverse teams outperform their peers on profitability and innovation. Female-founded ventures in Africa have also shown notably higher revenue returns per dollar raised than the market average.
That evidence gives advocates a language investors and policymakers understand, turning inclusion from a moral argument into a competitiveness one.
Practical solutions: training, mentorship and jobs
A growing ecosystem of programmes is working to close these gaps in practical ways. In Kenya, AkiraChix has spent over a decade training young women and girls, including refugees from Kakuma camp, in software development, UI/UX and hardware design through its flagship codeHive programme.
The results speak in numbers rarely seen in workforce-development work anywhere. The large majority of graduates move into junior developer roles within two months of finishing, with reported income gains exceeding 140% within a year.
Programmes like this pair technical training with mentorship and job placement. In doing so, they address both the pipeline and the workplace-transition problem.
Public action and better evidence
Government and regulatory bodies are also stepping in. Kenya’s Communications Authority, working with national statistics agencies, tracks gender gaps in mobile and internet access. It has also tied its Digital Superhighway infrastructure programme, which aims to establish thousands of digital hubs and hotspots, explicitly to closing the rural-urban and gender divides in digital literacy.
Continent-wide, organisations such as Disrupt Africa and Briter Bridge publish annual diversity data that has made the funding gap impossible to ignore. This gives advocates, journalists and policymakers a shared evidence base to push for change.
Building community and shared commitment
Community networks fill gaps that formal programmes cannot always reach. Women-in-tech meetups, hackathons and mentorship circles connect early-career women with role models and peer support, countering the isolation that so often drives women out of technical roles.
Corporate partnerships, such as fintech companies co-funding training programmes, are increasingly treating this work not as charity but as talent-pipeline investment.
None of these efforts alone will close a gap decades in the making. Together, however, they represent a shift. Closing the gender gap in tech is no longer framed only as fairness. Governments, investors and companies increasingly understand it as the difference between Africa’s digital economy reaching its full potential and leaving half its talent on the table.
A digital future built by everyone
As more women step into technology, not only as users and consumers but as builders, founders and decision-makers, the digital tools shaping Africa’s future stand a far better chance of reflecting the needs of the whole society they are meant to serve.