Georgia: No story is too small to tell

Dar es Salaam. There's a way that technology in futurist movies is portrayed that gives dreamers and curious minds alike that urge to move one step closer to the possibilities of what may be.

The first time I heard of Ms Georgia Rwechungura, I heard all the wonderful things and her geeky prowess and I was intrigued to meet her.

Extremely reserved by nature, I quickly came to learn how deep her passion for empowering young and not so young minds with basic tech knowledge is.

The movie 'Spy Kids: Armagedon' has the main antagonist, a brilliant coder and gamer, create a game universe that was so real it affected real-life.

However, at the end of the movie, he did become the 'Court Jester' player whose mission was to teach others to use technology responsibly.

This teacher version of the Court Jester reminded me of Georgia's tango with tech, particularly how she threw herself into teaching coding and other computer skills to people who had zero exposure, let alone experience with gadgets.

She proved to me that for us to truly achieve digital inclusion in all aspects, such activities are a necessity all those with the know-how should endeavour to take part in.

Georgia's tech path has always been ingrained in her. She is as a tech community leader, android developer and cybersecurity analyst, and currently works with Sanku as an IT Specialist.

She studied Information Technology at the Institute of Finance Management and shortly before completing, she had her first opportunity to put her skills to the test and work directly with tech when she volunteered to help a friend debug as he trained android developers in Tanzania.

This was during a period that had very few android developers in Africa and her friend, having trained in Kenya, came back to Tanzania to begin replicating this knowledge. At the time, she wasn’t very skilled with android and was working with the knowledge she’d acquired in university but her debugging role helped her improve her skill. The trainings took place in various places such as Buni Hub, Arusha Technical College and The Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NM-AIST) in Arusha.

Georgia then did a short stint as a technical mentor at Help To Help and a short while later, she met someone who at the time was a volunteer for Google, who also had an interest in training others and because android is a Google product, any time there is a release of new material and updates, the Google Developer’s Group (GDG) receives it instantly.

“This friend introduced me to the platform (GDG), which is a global community with different chapters in different cities and in Tanzania, we currently have 4; Dar es Salaam, Kagera, Arusha, Mwanza,” Georgia shares.

Through these communities, a lot of trainings were held and study jams from Google were run when new technologies were released. Many of these sessions were held at the Buni Hub. As a volunteer, she was among the people who trained interns and other interested applicants and attendees during these sessions.

After doing this for quite some time, her friend officially introduced her to Google and in 2016, she became a Google Developer Community Lead. This positioned her to be able to train people, host events and bring in guest speakers to talk about certain technologies at Google.

Some of the products she was able to train people on included android, chrome, G-Suite, machine learning, TensorFlow and many more depending on the theme and purpose of the event.

Around the same time, she also became Lead for Women Techmaker which is another Google Initiative and part of the GDG community. This initiative focuses on giving women resources to help them build the career paths in technology and push for an increase of diversity in technology.

Google has an array of communities and initiatives that are geared to cater to various groups and with the goal of pushing technological growth.

These platforms opened a door for Georgia to both learn and teach, many of these opportunities not always coming with the pre-requisite tech background.

As she continued to hone her different technical skills, an opportunity to work with Code Bus Africa, a creative technology and youth empowerment project, as a technical trainer, presented itself when in good faith and knowledge of her skill, her name was put forward.

Georgia worked with this project for a period of four months, her main task being training children, with no computer knowledge, on how to code with the use of Sonic Pi Music software.

What made this even more challenging was the fact that she would be given 9 hours to take a complete beginner to a point where they can write simple code.

“Sometime before taking part in the Code Bus Africa project, I was selected as a trainer for a project called ‘She Codes For Change’ which took place all over Tanzania and I was placed in the Lake Zone area,” Georgia shares.

“We were given 3 days to train people who have never touched a computer, let alone seen a phone, and I had these 3 days to train them and make sure they can come up with an application which works on a phone.”

She adds that it was perhaps the most challenging experience at the time, until Code Bus came along with the 9-hour challenge.

“It was challenging training these people and we were using the MIT App Inventor for this particular project because it didn't require that the students write the code themselves,” she explains.

“Rather, with the MIT App Inventor, you drag and drop the interface and you work with code blocks that help the learner understand what results they will get for each action.”

For Georgia, despite the challenges and lack of access to these computers that the students faced, seeing the results of their hard work, focus and dedication to learn, despite the tight schedules was a fulfilling experience.

Over time, she dedicated a lot of her time to training people who would have otherwise not had the chance, especially those in rural areas with little to no access to technology.

She was also stationed in Iringa for about a year and a month, working as the Digital Learning Project Coordinator with a company called Lyra in Africa.

Her roles expanded beyond teaching to coordinating Lyra's digital learning initiatives, putting together tech competitions in Iringa and an array of other activities.

In all the roles and activities that Georgia has taken part, sharing this information and teaching has been key to her growth as well.

“I have had sponsors play a big role in my growth. People have mentioned my name in rooms I have never been in and this has opened plenty of opportunities for me to grow,” she shares.

“Then there are those who actively mentored and coached me from the moment I set foot in the arena and have been instrumental in helping me make friends on a wider global scale,” she adds

“I now delegate, share opportunities and do for those behind me, what others before me did for me,” she adds.

She is an active mentor for those looking to hone their skills, she continues to hold events as a chapter lead for these different communities she is a part of and she attests at how humbling and fulfilling it is to see that she is able to give back.

“I am still a work in progress and I continue to learn, especially with how fast technology is growing and I am now working to learn the workings of cloud tech and other modern technologies,” she says of her future plans.

Georgia, reserved as she is, exemplifies why the need to do whatever you can in your corner of the world can go a mile long.

Like the Court Jester in that movie, there is a lot more joy in sharing knowledge and growing together towards a digitally inclusive Tanzania.

Supported by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation