What kind of world are you living in? What kind of changes do you want to see in the world? And how do you want to shape it? Juliana Rotich has been giving her best answers to those questions through what she has been doing.
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1977, Juliana co-founded Ushahidi, an open-source project that allows users to crowdsource crisis information to be sent via mobile. In addition, she’s co-founder of BRCK Inc., an innovative technology designed to help people in Africa connect to the Internet anywhere, even if there is no electricity nearby. She was recognized by Fortune magazine as one of 2014’s 50 global leaders and as the Social Entrepreneur of the year 2011 by the World Economic Forum.
Her fascination with technology ecosystems worldwide drives her mission in life to make things, fix problems, and help others. In primary school, she was fascinated by an encyclopedia, especially biology. Attending high school was when she discovered computers in their earliest computer labs.
She went to the University of Missouri–Kansas City and got a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. When graduated from college, she was already working in the network operations center at Sprint, with a front-row seat to the mobile phone explosion and the growth of the Internet. That was where she learned a lot about the ATM links — the undersea connections of the Internet from the US to Europe and the rest of the world. At that time, she was looking forward to putting fiber-optic connections to Africa. Once when she was in the countryside back in Kenya, there was a media blackout, which caused a lot of fear. People weren’t sure whether they could even go to town, whether the airport was open. She was supposed to go back to work but couldn’t. A few months later, she went back to the US., trying to solve this issue. In June 2008, she and her partners made it into a formal organization. Since then, they kept on releasing an open-source version of a platform, along with uptake seen worldwide. That platform, Ushahidi, was first put into practice during the Kenyan presidential election crisis of 2007–2008, and was being used all over the world extensively — in situations like the earthquake in Japan, and also in Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Pakistan, Tanzania, and Haiti.
Many people in various parts of Africa often experience power interruptions, which gives them crucial frustration, and there are 600 million Africans without access to electricity. So she wondered whether she could create something that acts like a backup generator for the Internet, so that when the primary connection goes down, it switches to a 3G network, and people can share that 3G network amongst a group of 10 or 20 people — That was how BRCK, a 3G router, was born.
For her, Africa is the place to be right now because people there have the most demanding challenges, therefore, the most challenging opportunities. She’s thrilled that it’s been incredible to see how the technology landscape has changed in Kenya and then the rest of Africa.
As for any advice for young people, she’d like to encourage them to think about what problems they see and what solutions they can come up with and go along with their passion. She believes: work is love made visible.
“What do you love doing? What do you enjoy that could get you lost track of time?” — these are the questions that she wants to ask and inspire everyone.
Juliana Rotich. “Transitions: Juliana Rotich.” Ushahidi, https://www.ushahidi.com/blog/2015/09/11/transitions-juliana-rotich.
“Juliana Rotich.” TED, https://www.ted.com/speakers/juliana_rotich.
“For girls, ‘it is possible to dream big’.” Africa Renewal, https://www.un.org/africarenewal/web-features/girls-‘it-possible-dream-big’.
Madalyn Weston. “Celebrating women in STEM: Juliana Rotich”, https://info.umkc.edu/unews/celebrating-women-in-stem-juliana-rotich/.
“Juliana Rotich.” https://www.lionessesofafrica.com/lioness-juliana-rotich.
