Tech Trailblazers: Rwanda
Digitizing savings and pioneering gender data capture
Photography by: Mary Gelman / VII Photo; Reporting by: Fiston Mudacumura; Photo Editor, Text Editor & Producer: Kaley Sweeney
Digitizing savings
“The core of my excitement about technology is how it makes achieving a task easy and fast, and how it makes almost everything about it more beautiful, contained and organized.”
Carine, 21, is a software engineer in Kigali, Rwanda, who designs apps to encourage savings and financial independence.
“The core of my excitement about technology is how it makes achieving a task easy and fast, and how it makes almost everything about it more beautiful, contained and organized.”
Her current project, Save, digitizes community savings groups, allowing more than 2,000 groups to communally save and collect interest of 6 per cent, per year, on their funds. Save also enables users to lend to one another at affordable interest rates – allowing members the freedom to pursue their personal, professional and community goals. Save's complementary app, Save+, helps users to fundraise around causes they care about.
Carine has loved technology from a young age, first teaching herself how computers work, before learning how to put them together and how to program them for social good. “Each day, you get a chance to update or upgrade your knowledge about [technology]. Any chance I get, I try to influence others on the little side of it I know.”
Today, Carine is adept at multiple coding languages, including via her Moringa School education, which provided key skills to her recent professional gains. She says some girls still fear tech courses because of social stigma, but that is changing.
To further this aim, Carine spends her free time mentoring other young female programmers. “I remind them that I am just there for them. If they don't understand, I provide the extra resources that can help them better. That helps boost the energy they put toward learning.”
Pioneering gender data capture
"Technology devices don’t just work by themselves. They need someone to run it,” says Jessica, 22. “Why not girls?”
For Jessica, empowerment through technology can start with only a smartphone. Jessica is a Girl Effect TEGA – Technology Enabled Girl Ambassador – a programme that was created to bridge the gender data gap.
In Rwanda, just 5.1 per cent of young women use the internet. Nineteen per cent of the young women surveyed are unaware of internet services at all. This enormous gap in connectivity and use translates to major data gaps when relying on digital data collection, leaving a void of understanding on the needs and lived experiences of girls and young women.
Jessica uses the TEGA app on her phone to fill these data gaps by conducting interviews and collecting data on issues affecting her peers, such as teen pregnancy, HIV/AIDS and sexual health.
“Technology devices don’t just work by themselves. They need someone to run it. Why not girls?”
She initiates open and honest conversations with her subjects on topics that are notoriously underrepresented in traditional research, and records them through video diaries that bring to life data and statistics.
The information Jessica collects as a TEGA helps her better understand and communicate the challenges girls face and their inspired solutions for how to solve them.
