She was a winner of the CNN Hero award, 2022 edition. Listed in the Forbes Under 30 Social Impact list 2022, a programme that recognizes individuals making positive impacts in their community by helping people in need or making contributions to society. Founder of TechLit Africa in Kenya, a renowned tech school that teaches computer literacy and skills to students.
On the surface, Nelly Cheboi’s life looks like one-long success story – but it wasn’t always that way.
Cheboi hails from rural Mogotio in Kenya. Like so many, she grew up in textbook African poverty. She experienced the strife and struggle of her mother, a single parent, who did everything she could to give Cheboi and her siblings a path out of that poverty: education. Yet despite the efforts of their mother, their living reality was tough, to say the least: a tin-roof house that leaked, a floor with potholes and, when it rained, a house prone to flooding.
“Looking at the poverty in the household, looking at the community and its suffering, it just became so clear that I needed to do something.”
Nelly Cheboi, via CNN
Poverty propelled Cheboi to study hard and work hard. It paid off. She received a full scholarship to Augustana College in Illinois in 2012, where she studied computer science. She was fascinated with IT and this soon became a passion, a passion she nurtured in the US.
While working as an engineer in the US, she noticed that most companies upgraded their computers every three years, and discarded computers ended up in landfill. This gave Cheboi the idea to recycle the computers and take them to Kenya.
So in 2018, Cheboi started taking donated computers home to rural Kenya, with all accompanying expenses paid for by her. A determined Cheboi told CNN: “If I have the power to change anything, I have to do it.”
The following year, Cheboi left her software engineering job in Chicago to create a non-profit organization, TechLit Africa, in Kenya, where students aged 4-12 get to learn computer skills from qualified teachers.
She partners with schools, companies, and individuals in the US who donate their computers to her instead of discarding them. Cheboi ships these computers to Kenya, refurbishes them and installs an operating system that supports their project-based curriculum, permitting the students to ‘learn by doing’ through a variety of tasks. This hands-on learning gives students a better chance to secure work online, with the ultimate aim of helping them provide for themselves and their families.
On receiving the CNN Hero award, an emotional Cheboi sang a Kenyan song with her mother. It was a song she would sing to her mother as a little girl when her mother returned home, exhausted. Cheboi translated the words of the song as “my hands are tiny so I can’t help you, but when I grow up, I will show you the world”.
Now an adult, she has achieved this. She has indeed presented the world to her mother. In her CNN Hero acceptance speech, an emotional and inspiring address, she thanked her mother, who made so much possible for her. Yet Cheboi has not only fulfilled that promise to her mother but also to the thousands of students who get to see the world through the computer literacy skills they acquire at TechLit lab.
TechLit presently has 4,000 students and works with 10 schools. Cheboi hopes to expand its capacity to about 40,000 students. Her plan is to increase the number of schools to about 100 and to take TechLit to other rural areas in African countries.
Onwards and upwards.
“My hope is that when the first TechLit kids graduate high school, they’re able to get a job online because they will know how to code, they will know how to do graphic design, they will know how to do marketing… The world is your oyster when you are educated. By bringing the resources, by bringing these skills, we are opening up the world to them”.
Support TechLit Africa by visiting the website here and consider a donation to theTechLit GoFundMe here.
