Abisoye Ajayi-Akinfolarin
Nigerian tech activist who created Africa's first coding camp for out-of-school girls in slum communities
This 34-year-old social entrepreneur founded GirlsCoding in 2014, breaking gender barriers in Nigeria's tech scene through 『container classrooms』 - modified shipping containers teaching programming in Lagos slums. Her #NoGirlLeftOffline initiative has trained over 8,000 marginalized girls in AI development and blockchain technology.
Ajayi-Akinfolarin's radical approach includes:
- Developing IBM-sponsored Yoruba language coding interfaces
- Creating Nigeria's first all-female drone engineering team
- Implementing menstrual hygiene tech solutions using Arduino sensors
Her
『technology must smell like the soil it serves』philosophy challenges Western-centric tech education models. The World Economic Forum recognized her as creating Africa's first feminist algorithms lab combating gender bias in machine learning.
Controversially, she hacked Lagos traffic systems in 2019 to display real-time domestic violence statistics - an act that sparked national policy reforms. Her students recently developed FarmExplorer, an AI tool recovering $2.3 million in stolen farmlands for rural women.
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