Martha Teye

Congratulations to Martha Teye, one of our 2020 Pass It On Award Winners. We recognize Martha for building on her own experiences to teach women and girls in Ghana programming skills.

Peldemy is a project which seeks to train females in the senior high schools in Ghana with computer programming skills. Together with Naa Ashiorkor Nortey, we train students in python programming and the Page GUI so that they can develop solutions to simple problems around them.

Martha was first introduced to computer programming in her second year at university. 

Although the lessons did not go well as expected, I still had the urge to study it as a hobby. My love for mathematics made it easier for me to study C and C#. With the assistance and motivation from a colleague, I applied for the Grace Hopper Conference in 2016 which motivated me to take my programming lessons seriously.

Along with expanding her network at GHC16, Martha built up her technical skills by taking Udacity’s Front-end web development nano degree course. From there she was well on her way to a career in tech. Along with taking advantage of various online resources, she has enhanced her skills by volunteering and building side projects. A point of pride in her journey so far is creating and launching her own app, which includes a chatbot that serves as an assistant to students.

I am proud to see that this platform has been used to train a few young women in Ghana and look forward to rolling it out to make it accessible to more users, especially the under-represented.

While Martha is often one of the few women on her team in various roles, she has used those opportunities to learn and seek out new projects.

My professional journey has been characterized with working mostly with men especially during my first software development role at Zlitch Technologies Limited as the only female on the Tech team. I took advantage of this opportunity to get involved in most of the projects at work and always learnt new technologies from them.

This openness to learn is what she encourages others to do when trying to break into the tech industry. 

You should find an area of interest, have a mentor to guide you and try to be the best in it. Finally, I would recommend you take up some voluntary roles in your preferred tech career path to gain more experience. I was able to build upon my skills through volunteering and successfully earned a job in the end.

Martha shares how AnitaB.org and the Systers community has been a big source of inspiration.

AnitaB.org exposed me to a wide range of educational and networking opportunities. Reading news stories from amazing women through the Systers newsletter gives me a sense of hope that we can bridge the gender gap in technology.

Congrats again to Martha and all our 2020 Pass-it-On Award winners!