After a decade focused on expanding women’s access to technology, She Code Africa is placing greater emphasis on what happens after women enter the industry: whether they can progress into leadership, build companies and products, access capital and participate in decisions shaping the continent’s digital economy.
That shift dominated conversations at the She Code Africa Summit 2026 in Lagos, where the Pan-African nonprofit marked its 10th anniversary with discussions around women’s progression in technology, visibility, funding and ownership of Africa’s digital infrastructure.
For founder and Executive Director Ada Nduka Oyom, the change reflects lessons the organisation has learnt since it began in 2016 as a storytelling initiative designed to make African women in tech more visible.
She Code Africa became a community platform in 2019 before expanding into structured learning programmes, scholarships, digital literacy, and other initiatives. The organisation says it has now impacted more than 65,000 women and girls, built a community of more than 50,000 members, and expanded across more than 20 African countries.
But Oyom said the experience has shown that simply giving women access to skills is not enough if other barriers remain.
“You can train a woman, if you don’t give her that opportunity, it’s just a dead end,” she said, pointing to challenges including access to laptops, mentors and opportunities to apply newly acquired skills.
Getting women into tech is no longer enough
Looking towards the next decade, Oyom said one of the biggest challenges is ensuring that women entering technology are able to progress rather than remain at the lower levels of the industry.
“The limitation is that these women come in, and then they don’t grow. They don’t progress,” she said.
She wants access to become normal enough that women no longer have to continually demand it, while governments, employers, policymakers and other stakeholders take greater responsibility for helping women advance.
For Oyom, that would mean seeing more women in C-suite and decision-making positions, alongside greater access to capital and improvements in education.
Artificial intelligence is also changing the skills women will need. Oyom said She Code Africa is exploring how to incorporate AI into the fundamentals of its academy programmes, including software development and product management.
‘We need to move from presence to power’
Napa Onwusah, Managing Partner at B4B Partners, reinforced the argument in her keynote, saying increased participation has not translated equally into leadership and ownership.
Onwusah recalled entering technology at a time when women represented a tiny fraction of students in her engineering faculty and later encountering employers who refused to hire women for technical roles.
She eventually built a career across companies including Microsoft, Visa, Cisco, Google and Amazon Web Services, but said women’s representation continues to decline as they move towards senior positions.
“Access has gotten us here,” Onwusah said. “But the question I want to ask us all, are we satisfied with just having access?”
She called for a transition from “presence to power”, with more women building technology and businesses, leading companies, funding ideas and sponsoring other women.
Funding, she argued, is particularly important. Onwusah cited figures showing that the majority of African startup funding goes to male-only founding teams and said that increasing women’s representation within investment firms is not enough.
“We need more women that have money that can fund projects,” she said.
Visibility must translate into something bigger
The conversation around ownership extended to a fireside chat featuring creator and entrepreneur Adeife Adeoye and marketing communications professional Favour Onwuka.
Adeoye said she initially approached content creation as a way of sharing information, but began seeing visibility differently after women told her that her content had helped them secure jobs and other opportunities.
“It’s not just about me being seen. I was creating access for other people because I’m sharing,” she said.
She encouraged women to make their work visible but stressed that visibility should not be reduced to constantly posting on social media. Professionals can also build visibility through communities, events, professional relationships and their work. Adeoye also argued that personal visibility should eventually translate into something more sustainable, including businesses and ownership.
“We’ve been talking, I think, for the past five to ten years about how we can get women in this room,” she said. “Okay, now you’re here, now what? What are we building? What are we owning?”
Who owns Africa’s digital infrastructure?
That question became more literal during a panel titled “Building Africa’s Digital Infrastructure – Who Owns It?”, where speakers examined how much control Africans have over the infrastructure supporting the continent’s growing digital economy. The panellists offered different views on whether complete ownership should be the immediate objective.
Speaking from a security and governance perspective, Oluwatosin Fatokun argued that Africa does not necessarily need to own every part of the technology value chain before it can exercise greater control.
“I don’t think the goal is to own the entire infrastructure or own the entire value chain, but play a very significant role in the management of the infrastructure,” she said.
That role, she explained, includes stronger governance, security standards and policies around infrastructure and data, particularly as African businesses continue to depend on global technology providers.
After 10 years focused largely on creating pathways into technology, the discussions at the She Code Africa Summit suggest the organisation’s next phase will centre more on what happens after access.
For Oyom, that means moving towards an ecosystem where African women do not simply enter technology, but have the opportunity to progress, lead, build and own within it.
Also read: How Ada Nduka Oyom is building Africa’s largest community of women in tech with She Code Africa
