This World Youth Skills Day, we’re commemorating our divine female community who represented Umuzi and the African Coding Network at the Pan African Conference for Girls’ Education in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia earlier this month.
Meet Umuzi’s CEO, Lyndi Lawson-Smith, our fearless and passionate leader alongside Deborah Adeniyi, an Umuzi Alumnus from Lagos, Nigeria. With 15 years of experience in the digital education sector, Lyndi captains our ship with grace, innovation and so much power.
Deborah is an exceptional young woman, a finisher of two qualifications through her ACN scholarship and an all-around delightful, infectious human being. She used these skills to pivot her career into finance.
Together they sat on a panel discussion at The African Union in Addis as part of the conference, discussing the critical topic of women's access to digital skills in Africa. ✨
Come with us on a little journey as we discover more about their experience of the conference and Umuzi’s presence at this prestigious event.
Umuzi on a Global Stage
The conference was the first of its kind, and thus a penultimate moment to be a part of the future of Girls’ education in Africa featuring ministers, ambassadors, NGO leaders, activists and young people from across the continent, coming together around this critically important topic.
We are honoured to have been a part of a panel discussion happening as part of the conference, discussing the gender gap in skills development and how we’re walking together alongside organisations like UNICEF to further empower women in technical fields.
Representing Umuzi on a global stage was by turns terrifying and validating for our organization, speaking to the undeniable scaling we’ve observed since we turned our operations remote following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The African Union is all space-age austerity…and realizing our panel was presented in the TV room (what I have affectionately named the room that features on SABC when the AU is in session - you know, the one with all the desks bearing country-specific labels) was a little surreal. ”
In a room of government officials, ministers, budget makers, international NGOs and diplomats speaking and thinking at a policy level, it felt like an opportune moment to tell the many stories of Umuzi, detailing our decade of learnings with regards to what it means to bring digital skills to young people in Africa, particularly to women. We’re proud of the majority representation of women on our core team, and the number of female learners in our ecosystem constantly prioritized and growing. 👭 Umuzi has an incredible story and we have a remarkable community of young people whose stories far outshine ours, and we look forward to prioritising the sharing of these stories more and more as we continue to scale across the world.
“Walking into that room felt like growth for our hard-working little organisation and I felt so much pride that we’d been invited to the table to be part of that conversation.”
It is beyond an exciting time to be in the spaces that we’ve found ourselves in, with our community taking us so much further than our once humble studio in Jeppestown, South Africa could imagine - and we’re here for it.