Africa: People, Food, Technology, Business

Tomorrow, I am giving a presentation to my home congregation of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church (Saratoga, California) about my nine trips to Africa since 2010. The talk is called “Africa: People, Food, Technology, Business”. I have linked the talk here so that my audience can access my pictures and stories after.  My bold intention in giving this talk is to present a small part of the wonderful complexity of the African continent, and to encourage them to visit and get involved in African enterprises.

“If you only visit two continents in your lifetime, visit Africa – twice.” – R.Elliot

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Images Copyright 2010-2017 by Katy Dickinson

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TechWomen Impact Coach again – for Lebanon!

I am so glad to have been accepted as a TechWomen Impact Coach again – and to be working with the same great mentor team as last year! TechWomen is a mentoring program of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA).  I was the 2010-2011 Process Architect for TechWomen and have been proud to support the program as a professional volunteer each year since then.

Mercedes Soria (Vice President, Software Engineering, Knightscope), Fatema Kothari (Technical Project Manager, Verizon) and I had a delightful experience as 2016 Impact Coaches, working with TechWomen’s inspiring Team Tunisia. We are looking forward to meeting our new Emerging Leader team from Lebanon when they arrive in San Francisco in September.

I am proud of my daughter Jessica who has herself been accepted as a TechWomen Impact Coach this year – for TechWomen Emerging Leaders from Palestine. I have just been looking over pictures from when Jessica and I visited TechWomen mentees in Lebanon in 2013. I am excited to further expand my knowledge of the people and culture of this ancient and fascinating country.

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Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson

Extra Gear? Gifts for Sierra Leone

My daughter Jessica and I will be visiting Families Without Borders in Sierra Leone next week with Terri Khonsari. If you have any extra laptops or smart phones we can bring – no matter how old or dead – the students will be delighted with your donation. Please contact me soon!

I have visited the inspiring and fascinating continent of Africa at least once a year since 2010. With TechWomen Delegations, I have been to Morocco and Tunisia in North Africa, plus participating in Delegations to Rwanda, Zimbabwe, and South Africa below the Sahara. With People to People, John and I visited Ethiopia. My only actual vacation in Africa was to Egypt in 2010 – a much longer trip than planned since our family was stranded there by the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano.  This will be my first trip to West Africa.

I bring gifts on each trip for our generous hosts and for new friends and colleagues. For my first TechWomen Delegations, I had custom pencils made but more recently, I have brought San Francisco keychains and geeky pens and toys given away at events like the Grace Hopper Conference.  For this trip, I bought keychains, the Willow Glen Wells Fargo Bank branch gave me a big bag of red pens, and I am also bringing packages of stickers for the children.

However, the best present for the students in Sierra Leone would be empowerment and greater connection to the wider world.  Your outdated computer gear can help them.  I hope to hear from you!

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Image Copyright 2017 by Katy Dickinson

TechWomen 2016 Fellows – Next Steps

The 90 TechWomen 2016 Fellows returned to their 19 countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. After a very busy month in the San Francisco Bay Area and a week in Washington DC, they have been been reconnecting with home and family. Some of us mentors in the Silicon Valley have continued working remotely with our mentees since we last saw them in Washington DC.  Two groups with whom I have actively continued to work are Team Tunisia (the development group of six from Tunis, plus three TechWomen mentors), and the TechWomen 2016 Fellows who have become Certified Mentors with my company, Mentoring Standard.

Team Tunisia has met remotely twice already and is busily developing plans, branding, and social media for WAKTECH. WAKTECH will developing a software application plus community system to improve public transport in Tunis. Our team won one of the TechWomen Pitch Day seed grants last month and we are  now looking for additional sources of funding and support. While we were in Washington DC, Team Tunisia was able to meet His Excellency Fayçal Gouia, Tunisia’s Ambassador to the United States. We brought along our TechWomen trophy to show him!

12 TechWomen 2016 Fellows have completed the submissions required to become Certified Mentors after returning home.  They have demonstrated that they hold the following three qualities:

1. Significant Mentoring History.
2. Good Reputation.
3. Respectable Professional Experience.

Congratulations and welcome to:

Engy Abdalla	Architect & Interior Designer, TechWomen 2016 Fellow	Alexandria, Egypt
Yousra Anwar Abdelhady	Independent Trainer, TechWomen 2016 Fellow	Alexandria, Egypt
Chioma Hannah Ezedi	Programmer, Abububakar Tafawa Balewa University, TechWomen 2016 Fellow	Bauchi, Nigeria
Yelena Filipchik	Sales Intelligence Manager, PepsiCo, TechWomen 2016 Fellow	Almaty, Kazakhstan
Habsatou Nadia	Project Engineer, Cameroon Telecommunication, TechWomen 2016 Fellow	Yaounde, Cameroon
Kitio Tsamo Arielle	Founder: WIT, Computer Science Lecturer Assistant: University of Yaounde 1, TechWomen 2016 Fellow	Yaounde, Cameroon
Diana Hasan Nassar	Product Manager: souq.com, TechWomen 2016 Fellow	Amman, Jordan
Estelle Ndedi-Nzalli	Computer Sciences Engineer, Information Technology Department, Ingenieris, TechWomen 2016 Fellow	Yaounde, Cameroon
Dr. Francisca Onaolapo Oladipo	Professor, Federal University Lokoja, TechWomen 2016 Fellow	Lokoja, Kogi State, Nigeria
Gulshnar Salpykova	IT Specialist, Transtelecom JSC, TechWomen 2016 Fellow	Astana, Kazakhstan
Yomna Emad Saleh	Business & Innovation Consultant: Innovety, TechWomen 2016 Fellow	Cairo, Egypt
Nazira Sheraly	CEO, Agroholding Jashyl Charba, TechWomen 2016 Fellow	Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic

I am very proud of all of them!  More information about each of these remarkable mentors is on Mentoring Standard’s Honor Roll.

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Images Copyright 2016 by Katy Dickinson

Africa Wins!

At yesterday’s TechWomen Community Event, all five Pitch Day seed grant prizes went to teams representing countries in Africa: Cameroon, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tunisia, and Kenya! All 19 presentations from Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa were so inspiring, I am sure the judges had a tough time deciding which to honor.  It was a pleasure to spend the evening with my daughter Jessica.

I am so very proud to have been one of the Impact Advisors for Tunisia! Our WAKTECH action plan to improve transportation in Tunis included six from Tunisia and three from the San Francisco Bay Area:

• Melek Jebnoun- Tunisia Emerging Leader
• Raoudha Lagha- Tunisia Emerging Leader
• Salma Saidi- Tunisia Emerging Leader
• Salma Sayah- Tunisia Emerging Leader
• Sinda Soussia- Tunisia Emerging Leader
• Yosr Tammar- Tunisia Emerging Leader
• Fatema Kothari- California Mentor and Impact Advisor
• Katy Dickinson- California Mentor and Impact Advisor
• Mercedes Soria- California Mentor and Impact Advisor

Early tomorrow, TechWomen shifts from the San Francisco Bay Area to Washington DC. What a month this has been!

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Images Copyright 2016 by Katy Dickinson

Advising 6 TechWomen from Tunisia

Since August 2016, I have been honored to be one of three Impact Advisors to the six TechWomen Emerging Leaders from Tunisia. We started meeting while the ELs were still in Tunis and we have continued our discussions at least weekly since. Mercedes Soria (Vice President of Software Engineering, Knightscope), Fatema Kothari (Senior Consultant,
T-Mobile), and I have had a wonderful time working on this.

On 7 October, the ladies presented our plan for WAKTECH at the TechWomen Pitch Day hosted by Oracle here in the Silicon Valley. This is the Executive Summary for WAKTECH, from our Action Plan:

The biggest public transport issue in Tunis is delay. Bus and metro schedules are confusing and unreliable. What makes this issue worse is the lack of total absence of online and offline information about these delays. Users are deprived from real time information about it. WAKTECH will be the first mobile platform to centralize the information about public transportation in Tunisia. It will provide all the needed information about traffic, schedule and transit itinerary. The particularity of this application resides in the community of trusted users who will be its main source of data.

We will be building an application that enables users to share information about public transit like departure and arrival times or possible incidents. Based on that data, the users can access at any moment that information to schedule their trip, be on time, and save money. Using WAKTECH will help create the smart Tunis everyone is dreaming of where technology serves the citizens to manage their time effectively and create a community of responsible users.

Our Tunisia team was one of 19 that presented – one from each of the TechWomen countries. I was so proud of their poised and professional presentation! Tonight at the TechWomen Community Celebration in San Francisco we will hear the results of the pitch judging – only five teams will win one of the cash prizes. There were many superb presentations and inspiring projects proposed for Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Wish us luck!

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Images Copyright 2016 by Katy Dickinson

TechWomen Community Cycle

The TechWomen mentoring program has been since 2010 a big part of my annual planning. 90 Emerging Leaders from 19 countries in Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East will arrive in the San Francisco Bay Area in about ten days to start working at local STEM companies.  I am already working with the 6 ELs from Tunisia as one of their 3 Impact Advisors. Our Impact Advisory group has been meeting remotely every Friday – I look forward to meeting the Tunisia ladies in person soon.  The 2016 Emerging Leaders will be in the USA until mid-October, returning home after a visit to Washington DC.

I am also enjoying supporting one of my 2014 mentees, TechWomen Fellow and Fulbright Fellow Mai Temraz from Gaza, who will be starting her MBA at Cal State San Bernardino next month.  Several of us visited Mai and her family in Gaza City earlier this year.  The Temraz family is staying with us in San Jose while Mai goes through orientation at UC Davis.  Last weekend, my daughter Jessica, Mai, and I did a road trip to help find an apartment in San Bernardino and to see the Cal State campus.  In a few weeks, the Temraz family will move to Southern California.

TechWomen is more than an Initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, it has become a beloved community and extended family for many of its participants.

Walaa, Mai, and Yazan Temraz in San Jose, California, August 2016

TechWomen Erin Keeley, Eileen Brewer, Mai Temraz, Jessica Dickinson Goodman, Katy Dickinson, and Aliya Janjua in Gaza City, February 2016

TechWomen Seham Al-Jaafreh, Mai Temraz, and Katy Dickinson, San Bruno Park, California, October 2014

TechWomen in Tunisia, with Impact Advisors in California, August 2016

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Images Copyright 2014-2016 by Katy Dickinson