Kenyan wins Google 2010 award for phone app

“I wanted to see and interact with some of the engineers to make sure they were all human and not robots,” she said. “They were pleasant and was taken by the working environment, especially the massage chair with piped music to relieve stress.”

In addition to the trip, Ms Gitau received an academic scholarship worth Sh714,000.

Most of the money will go towards her PhD programme with some going into the implementation and support of a new tool, which she refuses to disclose, she has been working with.

After her O’ level she joined the African Nazarene University in Nairobi where graduated in a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, before moving to work for the Centre of Multiparty Democracy (CMD) as a Programmes Assistant.

It is at CMD she realised what she really wanted to do; use technology to inform and educate people.

Armed with this experience she set out to pursue her Masters at UCT in 2008 here she worked at merging her passion to help people and her IT skills by researching on how mobile phones can be used to support voter education in Africa.

Her research led her to work with a team that designed the system dubbed ‘Snap N Grab’, a Microsoft registered product that is a notice board mainly used by non-governmental organisations to distribute information.

Upon her graduation she opted to continue pursuing her education and hopes to finish her doctorate education by the end of this year.

Once her dissertation is approved for submission she plans to get onto the first flight into Kenya where she hopes to pursue non-academic research and be part of the development agenda especially pertaining to ICT.

“The government should help build the capacity for our graduates to create for our underlying needs and even to export,” she said.

She said the policies in the Kenya need to be updated and be more supportive of the current climate of young up coming innovators and innovations.

The accessibility of mobile phones to at least 60 per cent of Kenyans has helped a high uptake of technology.