Finding Your Superpower
A Letter to Every Woman Building From Somewhere They Said Was Nowhere
The size of your dreams must always exceed your current capacity to achieve them - Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Former President of Liberia,
Dear All Women In Emerging Markets,
Find Your SuperPower
Keep this in your pocket as a small gift from me to you.
I was born in Nairobi. I grew up speaking English, Gujerati and Swahili and watching my formidable mother, Yasmin, navigate a tough world, take risks and build a biotechnology firm with my father.
She dreamed big. And so have I.
I spent 14 years at CNN anchoring global news from New York, Atlanta, DC and London. I covered every major crisis. When I left CNN, people asked me what I was going to do.
I said I want to build my own ideas. It was a long hard road. It still is. But I love the freedom of having my own ideas, moving fast and breaking things, and flipping the script.
AI tools today now allow me to prototype and build my ideas faster than I ever imagined. I just need …. my imagination. Have the idea in the morning and have working product by the evening. Or sooner.
I’ll be talking about all that here with Techcabal’s Moonshot Series
I want to share with all young women around the world especially young African and Muslim women, what I want you to be thinking about, not casually but critically.
Here’s my advice:
You do not need a team of 10 or 100. You need an idea, your own authentic context and domain, and the willingness to learn the tools. Your cultural intelligence is your moat. You already have this ! It is a structural advantage that gets more valuable as AI gets more generic.
Learn the AI tools. Not because they’ll replace you, because they’ll make you 10x more productive.
Your cultural knowledge is your moat. No algorithm has it. Build on that.
Start building in public. Share what you’re learning.Don’t wait for permission from institutions. Build the tools yourself.
I recently met with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Nairobi. The first woman elected head of state in Africa. Former President of Liberia. Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Speak of formidable. Her Amujae leadership initiative is incredible It trains emerging African women leaders. Amujae means “we are going up. ” President Sirleaf often talks about how the next generation of African women leaders will not come only through politics. They will come through technology and media. She says the institutions are too slow. Build around them.
My goal is to successfully build products that solve problems in the communications space in emerging markets. I want to do it with a team of AI agents. And me, the human in the loop. I will work out the way to build what I want from a desk in Nairobi. One person. The right tools. The right context.And I’m going to compete with anyone, everyone.
What I Did About It
I Co.Founded The Rundown Studio. We build AI communications products for emerging markets.
I built a company media strategy and messaging workflow internally with existing tools and created agents to work with.
I built a communications intelligence layer for all teams to learn and use.
I’m building a Kenya prompt, giving prospective investors to Kenya a cultural intelligence tool that analyzes their business and what they’ve understood about our culture that can cause the business to succeed or fail
I built a ZainTrades Tool
I Vibe Coded a site on where I like to eat in Nairobi
Thomas, Gill and I are building Signal HQ, an information verification toolkit, for the current crisis. It’s not an easy build, and maybe I need to challenge the companies building LLMs to do better, actually.
Brutal Numbers
Here is the reality for African and Middle Eastern women in 2026.
The unfair part first.
In 2025, women founded startups received just 0.9% of total African tech funding. That is $28.8 million out of $3.2 billion. The lowest share recorded since 2021.
Only 2.2% of total startup funding went to ventures led by women CEOs. 91% went to male only founding teams. (Technext; TechMoran)
86% of African women surveyed across 52 countries lack basic AI proficiency. 60% have never received any digital skills training. Only 49.8% have any form of internet access. (ImpactHER / African Union CIEFFA survey)
Here is what those numbers do not show.
She Code Africa has built a community of over 10,000 women across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda, South Africa, Cameroon, and more, providing coding skills, laptop scholarships, and mentorship programs. (She Code Africa)
Absa, Microsoft, and Women in Tech launched the ElevateHer AI Programme across nine African markets. Over 10,000 women have already been trained in practical AI skills since the September 2025 launch, from students to entrepreneurs. This is what scaling looks like when corporations start building pipelines.
In Saudi Arabia, women now make up 35% of the digital sector workforce. In 2018, that number was 7%. (Saudi Gazette, September 2025) In Kuwait, 41% of startups are led by women. The highest rate in the Gulf. (Times Kuwait / Divan Centre)
My Takeaway
The story of African and Middle Eastern women in AI is about talent and momentum. Not about the funding. The person who builds deep contextual AI capability for African or Middle Eastern markets right now has an advantage no Western platform can replicate quickly (for now).
Spotlight : Kate Kallot
This was one of the most fun and informative interviews I’ve done on my podcast Embedded, recorded in Kigali. Inspiring !
Only 2% of African data is currently processed on the continent. Kate is building to change that. She did not wait for a technical degree. She did not wait for permission. She started!
Kate is the founder and CEO of Amini, a Nairobi based startup building the data infrastructure Africa needs for its own AI future. TIME named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023. Before Amini, she led teams at NVIDIA, Arm, and Intel, where she built the world's first AI development kit in a USB form factor. When I spoke with her on my podcast Embedded at the Global AI Summit on Africa in Kigali, she said something that has stayed with me: AI can either repeat colonial patterns of dependence or become the mechanism for sovereignty.
AI does not replace judgment. It amplifies it. If you have 25 years of African communications context, AI makes you dangerous. If you have bad judgment, AI amplifies bad judgment faster
President Sirleaf was right. The next generation of African women leaders will build around the institutions. The tools are here. The talent is here. The context is yours.
From a desk in Nairobi, one person with the right tools, the right knowledge, and the right context can compete with anyone.
I am proving it every day. So can you.
Start now.
Zain
Happy International Women’s Day.