Martha Chumo, a 19 year old woman living in Nairobi, Kenya, is raising funds for a Nairobi Dev School She’s hoping to raise $50,000, allowing the school to run for nearly a year.
Martha previously raised $5000 to attend Hacker School in New York City but was denied a US visa on the grounds that she could not, as single young woman, show sufficient ties to Kenya to prove she intended to return. But immigration decisions haven’t stopped her, and she’s moved on to building hacker skills in East Africa. I interviewed Martha about herself and the Nairobi Dev School project.
Martha Chumo
Tell us more about yourself: your schooling, work, hobbies, family, friends, whatever you’d like to share.
I consider myself an autodidact with a wide range of interests. Most of my “schooling” in programming, philosophy, languages, writing has been pretty informal. I’ve learnt using materials online, and books. Codecademy and Treehouse are two sites that have been very resourceful in my self-learning in programming :) I am yet to attend a school for developers – One coming to Nairobi soon, and I can’t wait for that! ;)
I am not sure if I have any hobbies, but I have interests in other fields! When not coding, I am usually reading a book on history or philosophy, learning a language (programming language or human ;), trying to improve my guitar playing skills, writing a book titled “Learn how to learn”, making noise about something I am passionate about, or jogging around. I am really
into learning! I believe that be the programmer, the writer, the poet, the philosopher, the Mathematician, and any other thing I so desire!
I have diverse friends due to my diverse interests – from fellow geeks working on open source software to musicians I want to start a band with. ;)
What is it like being a hacker in Nairobi? Who is in your community and what do you work on?
It’s a lot of fun, and work being a hacker in Nairobi. Tech is a young field here, so there is a lot (perhaps too many ;) of options on what to build for East Africa. At the moment, I am working on an online learning platform to improve eLearning. I cannot resist the temptation of making myself and others better learners. :)
My community here is mainly the user groups I am part of, most notably, Ruby user group, Google Developer Group, BlackBerry Developer Group, and MongoDB User Group. These are the guys I learn with, build (and break) stuff with, hang out and have a laugh with. They are also the people helping me set up Nairobi dev School! :)
Why did you decide to raise funds for the Nairobi Dev School?
I decided to raise funds for the school because I know I’m not the only one who is passionate about becoming a better programmer. I knew I will get the support of other programmers who understand the importance of providing learning opportunities to people in East Africa. I was not wrong about this! I have received a lot of support from like-minds! :)
The other reason is that I actually need the money to set up the school! ;)
What will the Nairobi Dev School be like? How does it compare to Hacker School, or to a university program?
Nairobi dev School is similar to Hacker School in that the students will be becoming better programmers. It’ll be, however, a little different in it’s structure. After doing some research and consulting, we decided that Nairobi developer School should be more of a beginner’s program. We are going to use the Jumpstart Lab curriculum in our training. We shall also have resident and remote developer mentors to guide the students as they learn.
Who else is involved in the Nairobi Dev School within Kenya and East Africa? Tell us about them.
Nairobi Developer School’s community is slowly growing. The BlackBerry Developer Community in Kenya is helping us set up, and looking into ways of assisting. East African Developers have joined in as mentors. Other Kenya writers — such as a group supporting women in tech and innovation in Africa — and entrepreneurs are also on board supporting Nairobi developer School.
This is a great response in such a short time! :)
Do you have volunteers from outside East Africa to become mentors? Who are they?
We do have volunteers outside East Africa willing to becoming mentors, which is amazing considering it’s been a couple of weeks since the campaign started. I have been working on getting mentors with developers from a number of companies, such as devbootcamp, Jumpstart lab, Pivital labs, ThoughttWorks and Codecademy. We are still working on getting more mentors on board. Our website will be up pretty soon, and more mentors will be able to sign up! :)
You can follow Martha on her blog and on Twitter. At the time of writing, the fundraiser for the Nairobi Dev School is still over $46,000 short of its goal. You can donate to the Nairobi Dev School campaign on Indiegogo.
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