Read this inspiring story of a 21 year-old Rwandan girl who won $10,000 grant for digital project

Read below,

I spent the last week at ALU in Rwanda, where I met with about 40 of our newly-admitted students. I was particularly struck by a 21-year old woman called Jisca Azabe Ngendahayo. Jisca first applied to join the founding class of our Mauritius campus
in 2015, but unfortunately did not get into the extremely competitive program. I asked her what she’d been doing since then and she said ‘I went back to the drawing board to become a better leader’.

 Here is her remarkable story: In 2015, after failing to get admitted to ALU, Jisca joined an incubator program in Rwanda at Hehe Labs , founded, coincidentally by Clarisse Iribagiza, an MBA student at the ALU School of Business. As part of the incubator program, Jisca learned human centered design and co-founded a dispatch and fleet management system called QuickRide. She and other fellows in the incubator went a step further and created another company called Awesomity to provide technology solutions in multiple sectors including transportation, education, healthcare and social community projects.

 One of the most exciting projects they embarked upon is Umbrella--a digital platform designed to empower and educate teenagers and first-time mothers to make well informed decisions about their sexual reproductive health. The app features things like “period cycle trackers” and “pregnancy mode”. The information is available in Kinyarwanda, the most widely spoken language in Rwanda. It can be accessed by web, on smartphones and USSD for feature phones. Earlier this year, Jisca and her team won a $10,000 grant from the Imbuto Foundation to further develop Umbrella. It will go live in September 2017.

Throughout all this, Jisca never lost hope that she would one day join ALU. When she learned, in late 2016, that ALU would be opening an undergraduate program in Rwanda, she immediately re-applied. In March 2017, she got the result: once again, she had not been admitted, but this time she at least made it to the waitlist! After many months of petitioning the ALU admissions officers and not giving up on her dream to join the Founding Class of ALU Rwanda, Jisca finally received her admission into ALU in May 2017! Jisca’s story inspires me and my colleagues at African Leadership University to keep doing our work.

 She embodies exactly the type of leader we need in Africa today. She is young (only 21) and she is taking matters into her own hands by creating opportunities for herself and for others. She and her co-founder Fileille Naberwe, another young woman who also got admitted into ALU Rwanda, now employ 8 people (including 6 male software engineers!). By not giving up her dream to attend ALU, she has demonstrated perseverance, a trait I find characteristic of all great leaders. Finally, she is innovative, adventurous, and is leveraging technology to create change in her own way. She never stops learning and investing in herself. Jisca and Fileille remind me of the incredible potential that exists in our continent. It also reminds me of what African women can do if empowered. We just need to find more young people like Jisca and give them opportunities. In doing so, we can truly unleash the potential of our entire continent.