I still remember the day I realized my first startup dream wasn’t going to work out. I had poured my savings into building a mobile app to help people with type 1 diabetes predict their blood sugar levels. The idea was simple but ambitious: because insulin pumps were prohibitively expensive in many African countries, what if we could predict a patient’s blood sugar a few hours in advance and help them prevent dangerous highs and lows? I had no team, no funding, just a stubborn determination to succeed.

I grew up in western Uganda, in Bushenyi, and stumbled into computer science almost by chance. My cousin mentioned the course, my dad encouraged me to apply for it, and soon I was enrolled at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda’s capital. I had no idea where it would take me.

In 2019, when I finished university, I wasn’t sure how to turn my passion for artificial intelligence (AI) into a career. In Ghana, people told me, “You can’t really do AI here, you have to go abroad.” I believed that, until I attended Data Science Africa (DSA) in Accra that same year.

I grew up in rural Kenya, surrounded by farmlands. It was a simple life, but it shaped the way I think about problems and solutions. I learned early on how important observation and curiosity are, noticing how crops grew and how animals behaved. Later, I went to high school quite far from home and then to Kenyatta University in Nairobi. That’s where my journey toward data science began.