Winnie Gathu is building the infrastructure that helps African talent move from potential to participation.

The Founder and Executive Director of Girl Code Movement, Gathu works at the intersection of technology, entrepreneurship, youth development and innovation, using emerging technologies as tools for creating practical pathways into employment, enterprise and leadership. Her work spans Kenya and Zambia and increasingly focuses on what happens after skills development: whether young people can actually use what they have learned to access markets, build businesses and contribute to the economies taking shape around them.

Girl Code Movement was founded in 2023 and has grown into an innovation infrastructure organisation focused on helping young people move from exposure to execution. Its work includes digital fabrication, civic technology, design thinking, hackathons and applied learning, with participants developing solutions to real challenges across areas including manufacturing, education, governance and climate.

For Gathu, technology has never been the destination. It is the mechanism.

Her focus has increasingly shifted from delivering individual programmes to designing the systems around talent development. That means understanding not only how young people learn, but how their skills are verified, how employers discover capability, how entrepreneurs access markets and how innovation can move across borders.

That perspective is particularly relevant as Africa’s technology landscape changes rapidly. Gathu has become increasingly vocal about the need to ensure that emerging technologies such as AI create participation rather than deepen existing inequalities. She has also highlighted the importance of considering the informal economy, where technology’s impact will extend far beyond traditional corporate workplaces.

Her work with Girl Code Movement reflects that broader view. The organisation has developed programmes in areas including 3D design, modelling and printing, helping young people move beyond consuming technology towards designing and producing with it. More recently, its programming has expanded into emerging areas including Web3, AI and other technologies shaping the future of work.

Gathu is also interested in what happens when talent development is connected directly to industry. Her vision is to build systems where young people can demonstrate what they are capable of through real projects and where employers can identify talent based on capability rather than credentials alone.

That ambition is reflected in her growing engagement with conversations around AI, digital infrastructure and cross-border entrepreneurship. In 2026, she participated in the Africa Technology Show in Nairobi, contributing to discussions on how government initiatives, emerging technologies and regional collaboration can create more meaningful opportunities for young entrepreneurs. She has argued that Africa’s opportunity is not simply to adopt technology, but to equip its young people to build with it.

The scale of that ambition has also changed the way Gathu thinks about leadership.

“I am learning to lead from behind,” she says.

As Girl Code Movement has grown, she has had to confront a familiar challenge for founders: the instinct to remain at the centre of every decision. With teams operating across different locations and the organisation moving into new markets, Gathu is deliberately stepping away from operational control and towards governance, asking herself whether the systems she builds can function without her.

She describes the process as uncomfortable, but necessary.

The leader she wants to become, she says, is one who can “design the architecture, place the right people inside it, and trust the structure to hold.”

That same shift can be seen in how she communicates her work. Earlier in her career, Gathu felt pressure to demonstrate her technical expertise, particularly as a young woman navigating technology without a traditional computer science background. Today, her work increasingly places her in conversations with policymakers, investors, educators and industry leaders. Her role is less about demonstrating that she understands every technical detail and more about translating why the technology matters to the people who have the power to move an idea forward.

For Gathu, influence is therefore not about speaking louder. It is about making an idea understandable enough for others to build with it.

Her ambition for the next five years is to help shift the African conversation from developing talent to deploying talent.

She sees the gap between training and economic opportunity as one of the continent’s most important challenges. Young people can acquire digital skills, earn certificates and participate in programmes, yet still struggle to find the bridge between capability and their first meaningful economic opportunity.

Gathu wants to build that bridge.

Her vision includes stronger systems for verifying talent, connecting young people to real market opportunities and enabling African talent to move across borders without having to leave the continent to find opportunity. She is particularly interested in building stronger Kenya-Zambia connections and exploring how similar models could eventually extend into other African markets.

It is a deliberately infrastructure-led approach to youth development. Instead of asking only how many people have been trained, Gathu wants to know how many businesses have been launched, how many jobs have been created, how many contracts have been secured and how many young Africans can see a clear path from their potential to a paycheck.

Her recent work reflects that philosophy. Girl Code Movement continues to develop hands-on programmes in digital manufacturing and innovation, while Gathu’s public engagements increasingly place her at the intersection of technology, policy, entrepreneurship and economic participation.

The result is a model of leadership that is less concerned with building a programme around a founder and more concerned with building systems that can outlast one.

For Gathu, Africa’s greatest competitive advantage is not technology itself. It is the people who can use it to solve problems, create businesses, shape industries and build new possibilities – provided the infrastructure exists to help them participate.

She is building that infrastructure one connection at a time.

Winnie Gathu is a Future 54 Leading Women honouree in the 2026 Cohort, recognising women shaping Africa through leadership, innovation, entrepreneurship and meaningful impact.