JUDGES

Barbara is a groundbreaking Ugandan social entrepreneur, technologist, consultant, mentor,

International speaker and IT project manager.

She is the Executive Director and co-founder of Hive Colab, Uganda’s first innovation hub, business accelerator and incubator for East African technology startups and whose mission is to build local tech capacity and scale up ideas with positive social and economic returns. She has a managed and developed Hive Colab into Uganda's leading Innovation and Technology Hub and developed relationships with Government, Development partners, International organizations such as Microsoft, Intel, Google and others.

She is also the founder of WITU (women in Technology Uganda) an Organization that transforms and empowers lives of women and girls using STEM education and digital

jobs. Barbara has a MSC. in Information systems management from University of Salford, Manchester, UK, a bachelor's degree in Business computing from Makerere University Business School and a post graduate diploma in project planning and management from Uganda Management Institute.

Barbara is a 2014 Anita Borg Institute Change agent award winner and a 2017 Young African Leaders Initiative ( YALI) Washington Fellow. Barbara has represented Africa on the power of Technology to transform youths at United Nations General Assembly, UN Ecosoc Youth Forums in New York (2012,13, 14, 15), UNESCO youth Forums on Technology in Paris(2013,14,15), UNDP in Berlin (2014, 15) on Technology and Africa, Africa Tech summit in Kigali about The state of Innovation in Africa (2018) among others.

Through her work, Barbara has trained over 4000 young women and girls around Uganda, both in school and out of school girls. Through her organization, over 71%of the trained women have managed to start their own businesses, go back to school and be connected to digital jobs.