Today’s Women in Tech are tomorrow’s pioneers

On March 15, over 150 people gathered bright and early at Carnegie Mellon University Africa for a full day's celebration of International Women's Day. The attendees listened to panels and lightning talks from leaders in tech, and heard from the keynote speaker, Ambassador Janet Oben, the Kenyan High Commissioner to Rwanda. The event was designed around the theme "Redefine Possible," a call to push against boundaries and reimagine opportunities for women.

The celebration was organized by CMU-Africa's Women in Tech (WiT) club, in collaboration with Google Women Techmakers (WTM) and Google Developer Group (GDG) Kigali. It was just one of many successful events recently hosted by WiT, one of CMU-Africa’s most active and involved student organizations.

"Our mission is really simple: to raise visibility for women in tech," says Cynthia Iradukunda (MSIT '26), president of WiT.

When Cynthia was in high school, she had little exposure to tech and its potential career opportunities; she only began to explore them while she was an undergraduate student. Cynthia recognized limited awareness about tech—including limited knowledge of successful women in tech—as a possible barrier for prospective ICT students.

"If you don't see people, especially women, who are doing the same thing as you, it's going to be so discouraging," says Cynthia. The idea motivated her to get involved with initiatives that could shine a light on women working in the technology space.

It was at an event she helped organize as a WTM ambassador that Cynthia was first encouraged to apply to CMU-Africa. Now that she's here, she's leveraging her roles and connections with WTM and GDG to maximize opportunities and recognition for women in tech while serving as WiT president.

Cynthia was there to see WiT win the 2025 inaugural Afretec Inclusion Award for activities organized by last year's committee led by delphine nyaboke (MS EAI '25), who served as WiT president from December 2023 to December 2024. The club was recognized for the 2024 International Women's Day celebration, the DevFest hosted with GDG, a leadership event in collaboration with AnitaB.org, and an Experience AI event where WiT taught primary school students about coding and AI. Those events drew substantial crowds—large enough that last-minute pizzas had to be ordered to feed the 100 extra people that showed up to DevFest. This year's committee, led by Cynthia, is already seeing great turnout at events like their International Women’s Day celebration, too.

"I see it as a really big accomplishment, and really, it's because of CMU-Africa," says Cynthia. "They help you with everything that you need to have your events be successful. It's really amazing to be here at CMU-Africa and doing these kinds of outreach programs to help women in tech."

It’s really amazing to be at CMU-Africa and doing outreach programs to help women in tech.

Cynthia Iradukunda, President of Women in Tech at CMU-Africa

Between these high-impact events, WiT also strives to regularly advertise the successes of women in the CMU-Africa community. Throughout March 2025, in partnership with the International Affairs Minister, WiT has highlighted students, alumni, faculty, and staff through their "Celebrating Women in Tech" series posted on their social media accounts. WiT also invites women to speak about their accomplishments through the "My Story" series; Samalie Piwan (MSIT '25) gave the first talk of the spring semester sharing her experience working as an information management intern at the World Health Organization. Cynthia has found that the women they promote through these projects are often very excited to be recognized and profiled.

"Anytime any woman in our community has achieved something, we should highlight that, to push them to continue," she says.

Alongside providing spotlights for women in tech, WiT is also working to help women break into traditionally male-dominated tech spaces. One of their goals is to see more women participate in the hackathons they help organize with Africa's Talking, for example.

"That's something we want women to be involved in, because if they're not a part of building the tech ecosystem, it's hard to get software designed with women in mind. That can have a lot of effects," Cynthia says.

Likewise, WiT is taking measures to help women apply their knowledge and find tech careers. At the International Women's Day celebration, the companies sponsoring the event brought employees who are alumnae of CMU-Africa to speak with the attendees and share the paths they took to get where they are. "When we collaborate with those companies, we can learn how people actually got jobs with those companies," says Cynthia.

During the celebration, 19 women also led breakout sessions to share their knowledge and technical skills with the attendees. Cynthia observed that some people planned to attend the breakout sessions to support the event, but doubted they would benefit much from them, a stereotype she says WiT is working to dispel. Surely enough, Cynthia says, even those hesitant about the sessions felt they had actually learned much more than they anticipated.

"You find that people sometimes think we don't deserve to be in the place where we are, that maybe we got here just because we are women, and we don't actually have the knowledge," Cynthia says. "But those women's knowledge shows that we got here because we are equally as qualified and deserve the opportunities; we have those capabilities."

Cynthia and the rest of the WiT committee are already gearing up to prepare another event with AnitaB.org this spring and this year’s DevFest in the fall. They’re also planning to use their funds from the Afretec award to organize outreach events for high school students.

"You find that high schoolers are really confused about where they should go with tech. But as graduate students, we’re aware. We know what to do and how to get involved. So we want to share that knowledge with high schoolers, so they can start early."

WiT is also looking forward to pursuing some new plans, like developing a mentorship program and open-source projects for CMU-Africa students. With each initiative, WiT pushes one step forward in shaping a more inclusive future of tech.