Rachel Sibande

Rachel Sibande (born January 9, 1986) is a Malawian computer scientist and social entrepreneur. She is the Founder of mHub, a technology hub and incubator for innovators and emerging entrepreneurs.She is a technology advocate, a recipient of a Google Anita Borg Scholarship. In 2016, she was named one of Africa's 30 most promising entrepreneurs under the age of 30 by Forbes. Dr Rachel Sibande is a Program Director and Long-term independent Consultant with the Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) at the United Nations Foundation. She leads sector-wide demonstrations of initiatives that leverage data for development projects and leads the development of analytical models of mobile network operator data, geospatial data, and national systems to enhance insights into health and food security modeling, among other sectors. [1][2][3]

Quotes

• To succeed in tech or any other male- dominated field as a woman, you need more than the technical skills; you also need to be confident, speak up and make your presence felt.Rachel speaking to women during an interview with the founding women
• We need something like this back home. I’m going to start it. Rachel speaking on her inspiration and motivation for starting mHUB
• If you don’t start now, you probably never will.Rachel speaking to African women.
• I realised my biggest asset was my technology skills and I started volunteering on various projects to gain relevant experience. Rachel during an interview with founding women
• It is still tough because you constantly have to make sacrifices in order to strike a balance.Rachel speaking on the challenges of being an innovator
• Realising that I need to make the best out of these opportunities not only for myself but for them has helped me manage the guilt, even though I still do feel it.Rachel speaking on the challenges women face especially childbearing and the tough decisions she had to make as a woman after a lost opportunity
• I established coding clubs for girls and children; a robotics club and machine learning community camps that have trained over 92,000 children, girls, youth and women to develop innovative technology solutions. I am also an entrepreneur in the energy space championing the development of low cost power through a thermal chemical process for rural micro grids. Rachel speaking on some of her achievements
• I am a dreamer. I like to dive into the depths of curiosity where introversion meets outspokenness, and geekiness reigns supreme! Rachel speaking on her drive
• “My parents supported me to pursue whatever field I wanted and raised me with the mentality that girls could do anything just as well as boys." Rachel speaking on the role her parents played in her growth and success
• For someone like me who wanted to do something different in the technology domain, I didn’t have many role models I could look up to. I think this is why I’m so passionate about mentoring young girls.Rachel speaking on why she mentors young African women in STEM