The female champions of Rwanda’s rising tech-scene
Lena Simon, Founder & CEO of betahills & Isabelle Bucyeyeneza, QA tester at Muraho&betahills
With the addition of two new innovation hubs per year, the latest most recently funded by Klarna founder Niklas Adalberth, Rwanda is rapidly becoming a favored African launchpad for global companies such as the Volkswagen Smart Mobility project and the Silicon Valley-based drone startup Zipline. According to the World Bank, Rwanda now ranks second in Africa in terms of the ease of doing business. This is Rwanda in 2020 -a tech hotspot on the rise.
At the same time, Rwanda is also known for its focus on gender equality. It was the first country in the world to have a majority of female members of parliament, currently at 61%, and one of the first to have more female cabinet members than male. This leap for gender equality has also taken hold of the tech scene, with several leaders in the IT industry being female, from the Minister for ICT and Innovation to the heads of Irembo and DMM.HeHe, two of the three largest tech companies in the country.
At the core of these efforts lie systematic capacity-building efforts and the conscious development of female leadership in the IT industry. A lighthouse project in this regard was a 2018 training-initiative called WeCode, which most notably resulted in Rwanda’s first all-female tech-company. This company is Betahills/Muraho, a QA software-testing house serving startups and corporations all over Europe and North America.
This talk will introduce you to Rwanda’s rising tech-scene and share the journey of Betahills/Muraho in becoming Rwanda’s leading QA company.
Bio
Isabelle Bucyeyeneza is a QA tester at Muraho&betahills in Rwanda, who is a passionate team player and leader. Graduating from an IT-training program and accessing the technology world, changed her life. What drives her most in life is to aim for a higher representation of women in tech by inspiring and promoting women to follow a career in technology, especially in Africa. She is known for her celebrations of every single achievement she and her team make by dancing around.
Lena is the Founder & CEO of betahills, a software testing company working with an all-female team of testers in Rwanda. By founding betahills, Lena sought to combine her passion for excellence in technology with her desire to achieve social impact and promote equal opportunities both between genders and between continents. Prior to founding betahills Lena held a position as Head of IT for Berlin-based startup Folkdays and studied business informatics at TU Berlin.