Written by HHFL’s very own Geek Girl, Bernadette
A geek is a person who is focused on intellectual pursuit with the need to learn and discover more. In the current world computers are the platform to learning more things at just the touch of a button.
Akirachix which is an organization that aims to empower women in the tech world held an event known as ‘Geek Girl Festival’ aimed at motivating young women to pursue computer based careers. Many women tend to shy of from such careers with the misconception that it is a male dominated industry.
Geek Girl Fest 2015
The event started at 9am. Security was quiet high and one had to produce a ticket in order to enter. The first speaker was a young woman at the age of 21 who owns her own company known as ValueRaha. Her aim is to educate young people on how to manage their finances and provide investment opportunities to Kenya and Africa at a large scale. Her company was nominated to attend a two week conference held at Stanford, California where she even interacted with the CEO of Yahoo Marissa Mayer. This was a motivation to all of us to work hard to achieve our dreams. Her biggest lesson was that we should read a lot of books in order to increase our knowledge and thus liable to a lot of upcoming opportunities.
We also had sections in different fields such as Design Thinking, Graphic design, Programming, online security and cyber bullying and finally data analysis. Each section was 40 minutes we were divided into groups and everyone went for the section they wanted. I went for Graphic Design where I learnt about empathy which means to feet into ones shoes and understand what product their want.
In the afternoon we had different discussions in various groups. The discussions were based on Careers, cyber bullying and online security. Each group presented their findings and we learnt a lot from each other.
Group discussion in progress
At the end of the event we were given T shirts but what I treasure most are the lessons I learnt during the day.
Did you know that all HHFL children and youth attend school and are supported by HHF until they achieve self-reliance. Learn more here.
