prepaidafrica: The inspirational...

By: vivian on terça-feira, fevereiro 17, 2015

prepaidafrica:

The inspirational tech guru who’s owning cerebral palsy like a boss

Disability doesn’t mean disadvantage. And Farida Bedwei, a celebrated software engineer from Ghana, is proof of that.

Born in 1979, Bedwei was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at the age of one — cerebral palsy is an incurable neurological disorder that affects body movement and muscle coordination but does not interfere with the ability to learn.

Bedwei has steadfastly refused to let her disability affect her career trajectory. Today, as the co-founder and chief technical officer of software company Logiciel, she is considered one of the most powerful women in financial technology on the continent — in 2013, South Africa’s CEO Magazine named Bedwei the most influential woman in business and government in Africa for the financial sector.

Her greatest achievement, Bedwei says, is the development of a cloud software platform that is being used by 130 micro-finance companies nationwide. These institutions administer loans to their customers by sending a code to their mobile phones via SMS. That code can be exchanged for money at any branch, making small loans available immediately.

Here, Bedwei reveals how tech can transform lives and how she defied the odds to find success.

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