Breaking barriers: The young women powering Kenya's engineering future

She should have been with her colleagues on graduation square at the University of Nairobi standing to attention when her name rang from the sound system. She should have been doing the tassel turn on her graduation cap at the climax of the ceremony but she was at home worried stiff like the rest of the world.

The ceremony was transmitted live via video link, among the first virtual graduation ceremonies in Kenya. “I don't even remember the graduation, to be honest. I didn't even watch it online!” Ms Abour confesses.

Wanjiku Kangangi was going through the same fate elsewhere.

A few short years on, Ms Abuor and Ms Kangangi are now part of a growing force of female talent in engineering and have long put behind them the tragic times that launched them into the professional realm in a male dominated field.

Engineering 101

For Shirley Muhati, medical school was the natural choice. Her elder brother had preceded her there, and she was gingerly following in his slipstream to pick up the scalpel as well.

“We were made to believe they make a lot of money,” Ms Muhati speaks of her childhood ambitions of being a doctor. When her brother came home with tales from anatomy class, however, she knew this wouldn’t be for her. Engineering became what she finally settled on.

Gloria Mbula was, in her mind, headed all the way to law school.

“Everyone would tell me I would make a good lawyer because I liked debating, arguing. I was always the loudest kid in the group,” she says. To this day, she’s still a seasoned storyteller.

This dream, however quickly faded as she discovered and fell in love with physics in high school, taking her to the School of Engineering at Jomo Kenyatta University of Science and Technology.

From familial guidance, or in Ms Muhati’s case, the apparent guarantee of getting scouted by the biggest companies while still in university, for these ladies, the pull toward a career in engineering was one they couldn’t resist.

Ms Mbula relays that her class had 15 women, a massive improvement on the class ahead of hers that had only two. Ms Muhati’s class at Moi University had 10 women, a fifth of the class.

The transition

Ms Mbula heard from a cousin that first class honours students got scholarships to study their Masters at the same institution, accompanied by a tutorial fellowship.

“This is a hack to getting a job and getting a scholarship, I told myself. I was going to go get a first class honours!” She did just that but opted out of teaching at her alma mater.

When she joined Isuzu East Africa in 2019, the training in class didn’t quite convert to the ground. T-squares and other draughtsman equipment for illustration used at school were replaced by software which took some getting used to.

For Ms Muhati, the industry can collaborate with universities to build what she refers to as an employee transitioning from student in plug and play mode.

“I would propose some of the projects [being] run in the universities be real life examples in industries so that people get to appreciate what challenges to expect even before coming to the industry,” she advices.

“When there are new concepts, they add them to the course, but they don't remove the old ones,” Ms Abuor laments, speaking of students having to contend with 80 units in an already challenging curriculum.

Proof and prejudice

These women speak of very little discrimination, if any, or of having to prove their mettle before being accepted by their peers at school and later in the corporate world. Ms Mbula swears that sometimes she even forgets her gender, speaking to the inclusion and support she receives on her mechanical engineering role in the automotive industry in Nairobi.

Sometimes, the prejudices are societally-imposed, as Ms Abuor explains.

“The feeling of proving yourself is innate. It's in me. I can't get rid of it. So I don't know if it's a ‘me’ feeling or if it's universally experienced by women, but that feeling is always there!”

As a trained electrical engineer working in the telecommunication industry, Ms Abuor recalls once deploying 15 services in a span of three months when she’d only been called on to do one!

Ms Kangangi however recalls a specific event that played out on her first day at university. She entered the massive lecture hall and sat down for her first ever class on campus. “A guy approached me and said, ‘Hi, how are you doing? Do you know this is an engineering class?’” she recalls.

She was slightly taken aback but quickly regained her composure with a retort that she knew full well where she was and was studying electrical engineering.

Other than that, she didn’t have any problems. Ms Kangangi has segued slightly and is today leading a team of seven other software engineers at Ketha Africa, an agricultural start-up looking to digitise the agricultural ecosystem for small-scale farmers in Kenya.

Generation next

Ms Muhati is a member of the female committee for engineers at the Institution of Engineers of Kenya, where on top of dealing with issues unique to women in her profession, one of their other roles is trying to build up the number of women in her profession. According to her, women number a quarter of the total number of registered and certified engineers.

At Isuzu East Africa where she works as a chemical engineer in the paint-shop, she speaks of their mentorship programme.

“We've partnered with Embakasi Girls. Every month, we run a ten-week mentorship session for Form 2 [students]. Part of what we try to do is just to inspire [the girls] that it's possible to go through with their studies, to do sciences, to be an engineer,” she says.

Ms Abuor’s contribution, on top of her duties is being a peer-buddy to newly recruited staff at Safaricom. “I'm proud of them,” she beams while speaking of the two young ladies whose hands she’s held, easing their transition into the fast-lane.

Down to business

Today, Ms Kangangi speaks with enormous pride about the work she does. “It is very fulfilling. I wrote the first line of code and to see how it has transformed lives, that was very fulfilling for me. It gets real,” she says of experiences when she goes from the back-end, as they call it in the trade, to meeting her human clients.

As a value-added service engineer, Ms Abuor says she couldn’t and wouldn’t have it any other way. Her work drives millions of transactions and conversations daily and she’s gotten so immersed in it that she gave up her passion to play music, something she thinks she should return to on top of the nature walks she takes these days.

Asked about her future, Ms Mbula goes back to people. “I see myself managing larger teams, having a larger scope. It may or may not be in engineering,” she says.

Given her people skills - she manages a team of 28- this seems like a natural path down the road for her.

Ms Muhati sums up an engineer as a problem solver. As process engineer for the paint-shop on the production floor, she feels most at home with boilers and ovens.

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