Meet Naijeria Toweett
Ask Naijeria Toweett what she does and she laughs: “The question should really be ‘what don’t I do?’”

Armed with a diploma in the performing arts, Naijeria began her working life using community theatre to engage the audience in conversations about citizenship and rights, and later to promote women’s rights. From there, her work evolved into building the capacity of sexual minority organisations and managing sexual and reproductive health programmes, digital campaigns and eventually technology projects.

Looking back, the connections are easy to see. A commitment to advancing rights, a fascination with how systems work, and a determination to create lasting change have shaped each step along the way. Combined with hard work and a commitment to continuous learning, these qualities have opened new opportunities. Almost every new role came through recommendations of, or connections to former colleagues – a reflection of the trust and reputation she has built over the years.

As Naijeria learned more about digital tech, she realised she wanted to design and build digital software rather than manage projects. In her mid-forties, she left her family behind to attend an intensive software development bootcamp in Barcelona, learning alongside students less than half her age. She returned to Kenya just as the COVID-19 pandemic was closing international borders and soon landed her first role as a frontend developer.

Today, Naijeria is a systems architect, digital product developer and technical lead for UNICEF’s Oky app, a global menstruation education and period tracker app for girls. She is also the founder of Mama Tech, a tech studio that supports start-ups, NGOs and small businesses to build and scale digital products, and Mama Tech Teaches, a feminist digital learning community that empowers women to design and develop digital health technologies.

For Naijeria, technology has never been about writing code for its own sake. It is about addressing real-world challenges in a sustainable way. That mindset has earned her an unusual nickname. A colleague described her as a ‘system breaker’ – someone prepared to challenge assumptions, rethink processes that no longer work and build something better.Naijeria liked the description so much that she promptly added it to her LinkedIn profile.

People often think the answer is to build another app. I always start with the problem. I ask, ‘What is the problem we are really trying to solve here?’

A Day in the Life

Being appointed to provide technical leadership for UNICEF’s global Oky app was an important career milestone for Naijeria. Her journey challenges the idea that there is only one route into a leadership role. Rather than following a traditional academic pathway, she built her expertise through hard work, continuous self-learning, a clear focus on what she believes in, and a determination to keep pushing herself.

Oky embodies much of what Naijeria believes in: open source technology that can be adapted to different contexts and languages, with a focus on improving the health and wellbeing of adolescent girls. The app is now used in sixteen countries and, as technical steward of the platform, Naijeria works with country partners and software developers to ensure it continues to evolve while remaining reliable, accessible and responsive to young people’s needs.

Having joined UNICEF only recently, Naijeria’s days are currently a mix of onboarding, meeting colleagues and building relationships with Oky’s growing network of country partners. She coordinates software releases, supports countries as they adapt and update their local versions of the app, helps test new features before they go live, and documents lessons that can make future implementations easier.

As often happens with rapidly evolving technology, the software has sometimes moved ahead of the documentation, so capturing and sharing what works will be a further important element of her work. In the months to come, Naijeria will be spending more time with country teams, learning from their experiences and strengthening collaboration across the Oky community.

Naijeria still sees herself first and foremost as a problem solver. “If I was explaining my job to my mother,” she says, “I’d say it’s about making things easier. If a process is confusing or difficult, my job is to work out how technology can improve it – or perhaps even remove the need for it altogether.”

Being a woman in digital tech

Naijeria entered software development in her mid-forties, without a computer science degree, and has often found herself to be the only woman in both technical teams and in conference rooms.Rather than seeing this as a disadvantage, she has made it part of her mission to encourage more women – particularly older women – to enter technology.

She regularly speaks at technology conferences, leads the African chapter of Women and Non-Binary Ruby (WNB.rb), and has established Mama Tech to champion women building technology across Africa.Looking back, she admits there were moments when she questioned whether she belonged in this space. She says, “I was the oldest person in my coding bootcamp and I didn’t have a computer science background. I had to become comfortable with being uncomfortable.”

Today she encourages other women not to underestimate the value of the experience they bring. “You don’t need to know everything before you start. You already understand the problems you want to solve because you’ve lived them. The technical skills can be learned.”

Building technology that endures
For Naijeria, success is about ensuring that communities can continue using and improving the digital tools she develops long after a project ends and her involvement has ceased.

After more than two decades working in the non-profit sector, she has seen too many promising digital initiatives disappear when funding ends. This has strengthened her belief in open-source technologies, local ownership and designing systems that organisations can maintain themselves.

She believes the next generation of digital health professionals will need more than programming skills. Understanding artificial intelligence, data governance, privacy and sustainability will become increasingly important as digital health continues to evolve. Her advice to anyone considering a career in digital health is refreshingly simple:

Be willing to learn. Be willing to say, ‘I don’t know – but show me, and I’ll learn.’ That is how I’ve built my own career.

Naijeria’s experience demonstrates that focusing on what you want to do and building resilience pays dividends – it’s never too late to do what you love.