This is the startup story of Dorcas Muthoni a leading Kenyan entrepreneur and computer scientist. She is founder and CEO of OPENWORLD LTD a company she founded at the age of 24. Her company is now a leading e-Government and Business Software Services firm in the Eastern Africa region. Dorcas has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.
Dorcas describes her Startup Story....
"My story of success started many years back when I started helping to build networks for universities, being amongst the first women engineers to work with the Kenya educational network. Later I started up an open source company called Open World that develops software for e-government, and in 2004 founded an organisation called AfChix, a technical capacity building initiative for women in the region. For over 5 years in Kenya and across Africa, AfChix’s activities have included organising annual career conferences with a special emphasis on the uptake of computer engineering careers amongst young women and high school girls. This is one of my greatest passions. We have trained many women in many of the African countries that have AfChix chapters, who in turn have become trainers and have trained other women. We also started a mentorship programme in high schools and this involved bringing together girls from secondary schools all over Kenya and inviting women engineers, women web developers, and women computer enginers to mentor the girls and give them advice. This has had a major impact over the last 10 years. This gives me great joy to see so many great women engineers from various disciplines emerge."