For a long time, telling a story meant getting someone else to let you tell it. A publisher had to take your book. A newsroom had to take your pitch. A producer had to put you on television. A media house had to decide that your story was worth its audience’s time. Technology has changed that equation.
Across Africa, women are using digital platforms, social media, podcasts, AI, archives and other emerging tools to build audiences, preserve histories, create their own media platforms and tell stories that may never have made it through traditional gatekeepers. Some are building entire businesses around their storytelling. Others are using technology to carry culture into new spaces, document experiences that might otherwise disappear, or reach audiences far beyond their immediate communities.
That is the idea behind Technology4HerVoice, the latest theme in Leading Ladies Africa’s Technology4HerGood campaign. Following Technology4HerJustice, which explored how African women are using technology for advocacy, protection and the fight for justice, this chapter looks at another kind of power: the power to decide what gets told, how it gets told and how far it travels.
The women featured in this story are working across media, film, art, publishing, podcasting, archives and emerging technology. Their approaches are different, but they share an important shift: they are not waiting for traditional platforms to make space for their voices. They are building the platforms, audiences and tools themselves, and that matters because technology does not only give us new ways to communicate. It changes who can participate in the conversation in the first place.
Meet 17 women using technology to tell their stories, build their audiences and make their voices harder to ignore.
Akumu Fiona — Akumu Fiona is a Nairobi-based Visibility and Digital Legacy Strategist, artist, writer and award-winning podcaster who has built her work around a question many experts overlook: what happens to valuable knowledge when nobody can find it? Across social media, marketing, technology, podcasting and content creation, she has helped impact-driven people turn their expertise into work that can be discovered and remembered. She co-created and edited Yes Girls Podcast with Claire Baker, a platform that grew around conversations on growth, life changes and mental wellness, and is now building Akquainted, an AI-powered visibility operating system designed to help experts, founders and executives manage and grow their presence online.
Akumu understands that in an increasingly digital world, visibility is part of how opportunities move. Her work helps women take the knowledge, ideas and stories they already have and build a digital footprint around them, one that can reach people beyond their immediate networks and remain useful long after the original conversation. Her own career has evolved alongside technology: from writing into strategy, design and UX, podcasting and digital media, and now into building software with AI. She also writes about how emerging technologies are changing expertise and the future of work, bringing her experience as a creative and strategist into those conversations. For Akumu, technology is a tool for closing the distance between having something valuable to say and having the people who need it actually hear you.
Anita Erskine — Anita has built one of Ghana’s most recognisable media platforms around a simple but powerful idea: give African women the microphone and let the world listen. The award-winning broadcaster, media entrepreneur and strategic communications advisor is the creator and host of Anita Erskine’s Sheroes, The Leadership Voice and The STEM Woman Project, and has spent years creating conversations that put African women, their expertise and their ambitions in front of audiences. That work now extends far beyond the television studio. Through Africa’s Business Heroes, global technology and sustainability conversations, and her own communications consultancy, Anita regularly sits at the centre of conversations about African innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership.
The difference today is that those conversations no longer have to end when the television programme does. Through YouTube, podcasts and other digital platforms, Anita has been able to take the women and stories featured across her work beyond the traditional broadcast audience and into homes, phones and communities across the continent and beyond. Technology has effectively made the microphone bigger, and that matters because visibility is not only about who gets invited onto a stage; it is also about how far her story can travel once she gets there. Her background in Cultural Studies and Communications Management, her fluency in English and French, and her work as Founder and Executive Director of Erskine Global Communications have also given her the tools to move comfortably between media, business and global institutions. Anita’s work shows what happens when African women are given platforms built to carry their voices further.
Buhle Ngaba — Buhle Ngaba is a South African writer, actor, theatre activist and researcher, and the founder of Maru Factory, a creative platform developing new writing and interdisciplinary work centred on Black girls and young people. Her work has consistently asked who gets to see themselves in the stories around them. That question became especially tangible with The Girl Without A Sound, her book about a young Black girl that was released as a free digital download and recorded more than 2,000 downloads in its first week before being translated into all 11 official South African languages. Her work across theatre, children’s literature and creative research continues to return to questions of identity, representation, history and who gets to tell the story.
Buhle’s decision to make The Girl Without A Sound freely available online was more than a publishing choice. It changed the distance between the story and the girl who needed to find it. That same instinct runs through her work as a Digital Curatorial Artist in Residence at the Centre for Humanities Research, where she curates The Southern Women’s Archive, preserving letters, journals and records of women’s historical organising, as well as The New Girl Code, which introduces young women to technology, coding and entrepreneurship. Through Maru Factory and KaMatla, she also works to preserve oral histories and develop the arts among young people in under-resourced communities. Her work demonstrates one of technology’s most powerful possibilities for African storytellers: removing some of the barriers that have historically determined who gets published, who gets access and, ultimately, whose stories get to shape how young people see themselves.
Cecilia Mwende Maundu — As a broadcast journalist, digital rights researcher and digital security expert, Cecilia Mwende Maundu has spent years working on a part of the internet we do not talk about enough: what happens when a woman’s voice makes her a target? She is the founder, host and executive producer of Digital Dada, a platform examining online gender-based violence, digital security, feminist technology and the realities of being visible online. Drawing on her experience in Kenyan media, including work with Kenya Broadcasting Corporation and Nation Media Group, Cecilia has built a body of work around helping women understand what it really means to participate in digital spaces. She has also helped develop a free digital safety toolkit for female journalism students, giving young women practical tools to protect themselves as they work and speak online.
Cecilia’s work makes an important distinction: access to a digital platform does not mean much if women cannot safely use it. Through Digital Dada and her training work, she challenges the idea that abuse happening online is somehow less serious, while helping women understand how to protect their identities, information and freedom of expression. Her work as an African Union Media Fellow has also taken her deeper into conversations around digital democracy, safety and how technology can be designed with vulnerable users in mind. As Secretary-General of the International Association of Women in Radio and Television Kenya Chapter, she continues to advocate for safer and more inclusive media spaces. In a digital world where technology can make a woman’s voice travel further than ever before, Cecilia is working to make sure that voice does not come at the cost of her safety.
Delphine Diallo — The French-Senegalese fine art photographer, visual artist and AI filmmaker has spent more than two decades challenging the ways Black women have been photographed, represented and imagined, using photography, collage, video, 3D and body painting to reclaim their sovereignty, spirituality and power. Her multidisciplinary practice grew out of an early career in motion graphics, video editing and art direction before she left the corporate world in 2008 to pursue independent art in New York. A mentorship with legendary photographer Peter Beard, followed by a period spent reconnecting with her father’s home city of Saint-Louis, Senegal, helped shape the visual language that would become central to her work.
Now, Diallo is taking that same fight into artificial intelligence. Through The Oracle Codex, she explores how AI can be pushed beyond the Western histories and datasets that have shaped so many of its outputs, while The Motherverse expands that thinking into a 12-chapter cinematic universe built around decolonised mythology, ancestral technology and Afrofuturism. She is not approaching AI simply as another medium for making images; she is using it to ask what happens when Black women get to build the worlds, histories and futures that the technology is trained to imagine. That question runs through a career that has taken her work to institutions including the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Taubman Museum of Art, and into commissions for The New York Times, TIME, Nike and L’Oréal. If technology is going to help shape what the world sees and remembers, Diallo is making a case for African women to be inside that process, not as subjects of someone else’s imagination, but as the people creating it.
Melisa Achoko Allela — Virtual reality, motion capture and generative AI might sound worlds away from an African storytelling circle. Dr. Melisa Achoko Allela is bringing them together. The Nairobi-based creative technologist, animator, interactive media designer and researcher is a lecturer at the Technical University of Kenya and co-founder of LESO Stories, an interactive media studio exploring new ways of carrying African oral histories into digital spaces. Her work includes Sigana: Tales of Lawino, where audiences enter a virtual storytelling circle and interact with a 3D animated storyteller designed to respond to their presence. Through motion capture, virtual and augmented reality, interactive voice systems and generative AI, Melisa is experimenting with what happens when technology is designed around African storytelling traditions rather than simply adapting those traditions to existing digital formats.
For Melisa, the technology is not there simply to make an old story look futuristic. It is helping preserve the things that make the story what it is. Her research captures the gestures, facial expressions, movements and physical language of African storytellers so that those elements can be carried into digital characters and immersive experiences. That work earned her a 2023–2024 Movement Lab Fellowship at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she researched motion-capture technologies tailored to African orature performers, building on years of academic and creative work. She holds a PhD from the Technical University of Kenya and a Master of Arts in Design from the University of Nairobi, and has taught multimedia design, animation and digital art at institutions in Kenya and beyond. Melisa is showing that African women do not have to choose between preserving their stories and moving with new technology. They can use the tools shaping the future to decide what their stories look like when they get there.
Eniola “Korty” Olanrewaju — Eniola Olanrewaju, popularly known as Korty EO, is the founder of Korty TV, an independent digital media and production platform that has built a huge audience around intimate, character-driven stories about contemporary African life. A filmmaker, storyteller and digital creator, Korty has made a name for herself by getting unusually close to the people she documents, whether she is sitting across from a global star or exploring a corner of Nigerian culture that rarely receives that kind of attention. Through Flow with Korty, Love or Lies and her wider YouTube platform, she has built an audience in the millions and created a space where African stories can unfold in a way that feels personal, unpolished and distinctly hers.
That independence is central to Korty’s story. After studying Computer Science at the University of Ibadan, she explored modelling and worked behind the camera at Zikoko before becoming Head of Content at Mr Eazi’s emPawa Africa. In 2020, she left that more conventional media path to build her own production company and digital platform, eventually landing major opportunities including directing for Victoria’s Secret’s The Tour ’23 and building partnerships with global brands. Her YouTube channel has since become a powerful distribution platform for her work, allowing her to choose the people she documents, control the way their stories are told and reach audiences without waiting for a traditional media house to open its doors. Technology has given Korty more than a place to publish; it has given her the infrastructure to build a media company around her own editorial instincts.
Galerekwe “Gale” Maimane — Film director, photographer and multimedia designer Galerekwe “Gale” Maimane has built a visual practice around the messy, eclectic and often overlooked sides of Black life. Based in Johannesburg, she has directed commercial and cultural work for brands including Castle Milk Stout, Jägermeister, Brutal Fruit and Ocean Basket, while her short films me and As Told By Us explore the multiplicity of Black stories. Her work moves easily between film, photography, design and digital media, giving her a visual language that feels equally comfortable with experimentation, cultural storytelling and commercial work. That range was shaped early: Gale explored animation, programming, graphic design and painting before earning a degree in Multimedia Design at Tshwane University of Technology and being selected for the Design Indaba Class of Emerging Creatives in 2016.
Gale’s work is also concerned with who gets the chance to tell those stories in the first place. As a co-founder and co-director of Girls in Film South Africa, she has helped build mentorship, funding and support structures for women, femme and non-binary filmmakers who have historically had less access to the film industry. Her own career shows how technology can give a storyteller more ways to create, but access to the tools is only part of the equation. Someone still has to have the opportunity to learn them, experiment with them and build a career around them. Through her filmmaking and her work with Girls in Film, Gale is helping widen that opportunity, creating new images of Black life while helping more women have the resources and confidence to create their own.
Jepchumba Cheluget — Jepchumba Cheluget is a Kenyan digital artist, cultural technologist, curator and activist who has spent much of her career questioning what African creativity should look like in a digital world. She founded African Digital Art in 2009 after noticing how little African digital creativity and technological innovation was represented online, creating a platform for African creators working in animation, digital collage, audio-visual production, 3D modelling and other emerging forms. Her work has since expanded into Afrofuturism, indigenous technology, speculative design and the relationship between African knowledge systems and digital tools.
That instinct to look for African ideas in places where they have been overlooked is rooted in Jepchumba’s own unusual upbringing. Born to Kenyan diplomats, she grew up moving between Kenya, India, Tanzania, Djibouti, South Africa, the UK and the US, developing an early interest in how African identity travels and changes across borders. She later studied Critical Social Thought at Mount Holyoke College before earning a Master’s in Digital Media in London, where African Digital Art began. Her thinking today also draws on her Kalenjin heritage and generations of indigenous agricultural knowledge, which she connects to her work in technology and sustainability. Jepchumba is ultimately interested in more than putting African culture into digital spaces; she is exploring what those spaces could become when African knowledge is allowed to shape them.
Linda Dounia Rebeiz —Linda Dounia Rebeiz is a Senegalese-Lebanese experimental artist, visual designer and curator whose work examines what happens when African memory meets the technologies shaping the future. Working across digital art, artificial intelligence and speculative archives, she has built a practice that challenges the cultural assumptions embedded in the systems used to represent us. Her work has been exhibited at institutions and platforms including MoMA, Art Basel Miami, Christie’s and Art X Lagos, while projects such as Once Upon A Garden use imagined futures to explore climate, loss and the disappearance of cultural and natural histories.
That interest in technology did not begin in the art world. Before becoming a full-time artist, Linda worked in human-centred design and innovation, including with IDEO.org, where she helped develop products and services focused on social equity. It was through that work that she began noticing how often the technologies being designed for the Global South were still built around Western assumptions, a realisation that eventually took her back to Dakar to establish her studio. Today, she uses AI in a much more deliberate way, curating her own datasets and building speculative histories that preserve people, cultures and environments that mainstream systems might overlook. Born in Mbour and educated at Maison d’éducation Mariama Bâ, the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg and UNC Chapel Hill, Linda brings that distinctly African perspective into the technologies themselves, challenging who gets represented, remembered and imagined in the digital future.
Lyonna Lyu — Lyonna Lyu is a Sacramento-based Eritrean/African diasporic digital artist, painter and illustrator whose work brings ancient Eritrean and Ethiopic Orthodox iconography into conversation with contemporary digital art. Her practice explores identity, belonging, political critique and the experience of carrying African culture across borders. Entirely self-taught, Lyu developed a visual language that moves between illustration, painting and digital media, and in 2020 her work was selected for the Go Vote Sacramento campaign, placing her civic-focused illustrations across downtown Sacramento.
Technology became an important part of how Lyu could preserve and give ownership to that cultural work. In November 2020, she began minting her illustrations as 1-of-1 NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, treating Web3 as a form of digital archiving as much as a new marketplace. Her work has since been collected by institutions including the Museum of Crypto Art and Museum of NFT Art, while her research with Hadinet Africa has taken her deeper into blockchain, decentralised identity, data privacy and other technologies that could support vulnerable communities, particularly across the Horn of Africa. For Lyu, the digital world is another place where African cultural memory can be recorded, protected and carried forward, and she is building with that in mind.
Marilyn Madlion — Marilyn Madlion has built a growing digital storytelling platform around her love for African stories and the people who tell them. The Nigerian content creator, author and storyteller, known online as Marilyn The Storyteller and the “Greatest Griot in the world,” creates video essays and cultural commentary across Instagram and TikTok. She began writing at seven and published her first book at 15, eventually taking that early relationship with storytelling into digital media and building an audience of more than 23,000 followers in five months through a deliberate 75-day storytelling challenge.
Her digital presence has since grown into something much bigger than content creation. Marilyn has worked with brands including Amazon Prime, founded Bubus and Books, and created the Marilyn Method, through which she teaches public speaking and storytelling. Her path has taken her from growing up in Kaduna and Abuja to studying Journalism at Carleton University in Canada, giving her both a personal and academic grounding in how stories are told and shared. The internet has allowed her to turn that long-standing passion into an audience, a business and a community of people learning to tell their own stories. At a time when young African women are often encouraged to consume other people’s narratives, Marilyn is using digital platforms to create, distribute and teach storytelling on her own terms.
Molly Jensen — As CEO of Afripods, Molly Jensen is building the infrastructure behind Africa’s growing audio economy. The investor-backed media technology company hosts and distributes more than 3,000 podcasts across over 50 countries, supporting more than 50 African languages alongside localised payments and analytics that help creators grow audiences and build sustainable businesses around their work. Founded by Jensen in Nairobi in 2017, Afripods was born from her desire to create a platform where African stories could be recorded and distributed without relying entirely on Western media systems. Molly’s work goes beyond helping someone upload a podcast. Afripods connects Africa’s established broadcast industry with digital audio, turning live radio into on-demand content and helping digitise and archive stories that might otherwise disappear after they air. That instinct to build better systems for African stories is rooted in Molly’s own journey.
A Ghanaian-American raised between New York and the UK, she grew up closely connected to her Ghanaian heritage and later studied Business Administration and Marketing at George Washington University, where she also played Division I college soccer. With more than a decade of experience across technology, marketing, sales and people management, she eventually brought those worlds together in Nairobi, where she is now helping create the systems that allow African stories to be found, heard and monetised on their own terms.
Mona Eltahawy — Mona Eltahawy has spent decades making space for women to speak about experiences that institutions and traditional media have often preferred to keep quiet. The Egyptian-American journalist, author and feminist is the founder and editor-in-chief of Feminist Giant, an independent publication with tens of thousands of subscribers across more than 170 countries. She has also used social media as a tool for organising and collective testimony, most notably through #MosqueMeToo, which she pioneered in 2017 after sharing her own experience of sexual harassment during pilgrimage. Muslim women around the world joined the conversation, turning individual experiences into a global reckoning with harassment in religious spaces. That ability to take a personal story and give it a much larger audience has been central to Mona’s career.
A former Reuters correspondent who reported from Cairo and Jerusalem, she became internationally known for her coverage and commentary on the Middle East, including during Egypt’s 2011 revolution, where she was arrested and assaulted while reporting from Tahrir Square. Her journalism, books and feminist activism have consistently challenged systems that control women’s bodies, voices and stories. Digital platforms have given her another way to do that work, directly, independently and with women around the world able to speak alongside her.
Ogunlana Oluwabusolami Habibat (Solana) — Ogunlana Oluwabusolami Habibat, known professionally as Solana, is building a sound around Yoruba language, storytelling and culture. The Nigerian singer and songwriter blends Yoruba influences with alternative pop, electronic production and contemporary Afrobeats, creating the sound listeners have come to call YoruPop. Her breakout record, Okunkun, produced by Killertunes, eventually reached millions of streams and opened doors to collaborations with artists including Joeboy and Victony. But before the song became a breakout hit, Solana had spent years developing her sound and navigating Lagos’ competitive underground music scene.
Okunkun had been recorded years earlier and faced industry resistance before its release, but Solana kept sharing teasers online and allowing listeners to discover the song on their own terms. Her digital audience helped build momentum around the record and eventually gave the emerging sound its YoruPop name. That direct relationship between artist and audience has become an important part of her story, allowing a sound rooted in Yoruba culture to grow beyond traditional industry gatekeepers. Solana’s relationship with music began at six, when she started writing, singing and rapping, and deepened during university, where she chose to pursue music seriously and began intentionally using Yoruba to keep her ancestry at the centre of what she created.
Rosebell Kagumire — Rosebell Kagumire is an award-winning Ugandan journalist, author and Pan-African feminist activist whose work has consistently centred African women’s voices, political realities and resistance. She is the curator and editor of African Feminism, an online platform documenting the lived experiences and struggles of African women, and has built a career that moves between journalism, digital media and feminist organising. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Quartz and New Internationalist, while her work in digital democracy and human rights has earned recognition including the Africtivistes Anna Guèye Award. Before building digital platforms of her own, Rosebell worked in Ugandan newsrooms including Daily Monitor, Uganda Radio Network and NTV Uganda.
That transition from traditional journalism to digital publishing has shaped how Rosebell approaches storytelling. The internet has allowed her to create spaces where African women are not dependent on international newsrooms to decide which experiences deserve attention, and where feminist analysis can travel across borders and build community. Her early commentary challenging the Western framing of the Kony 2012 campaign reflected that same commitment to African perspectives, while African Feminism has grown into a living digital record of women’s politics, struggles and resistance. With a background in Mass Communication from Makerere University and a master’s in Media, Peace and Conflict Studies from the University for Peace, Rosebell brings journalism and digital organising together to make African women’s voices harder to erase.
Samantha Wright — Samantha “Tech Girl” Wright has built a career around making technology and gaming spaces more accessible to women, while becoming one of South Africa’s most recognisable voices in global esports. A journalist, broadcaster, content creator and esports host, she began with traditional media, including work at South African youth radio station YFM, before launching the Tech Girl Blog as a technology and lifestyle platform. What started as a way to cover the technology and products she felt women were being overlooked in eventually grew into a much bigger media career, including international desk-hosting and interviewing roles at major Counter-Strike and PUBG tournaments such as the BLAST.tv Paris Major, IEM Cologne and the Perfect World Shanghai Major.
Samantha has also used her platforms to make room for women inside the gaming industry itself. Through Tech Girl Talks, she has conversations with women in gaming and esports, while her work has highlighted the sexism, online abuse and stereotypes women encounter in competitive gaming. She has hosted major African tournaments, including the Telkom DGL Masters and Red Bull Kumite South Africa, and has helped create women-focused gaming events and workshops that give girls access to skills, resources and confidence. Her journey from a journalist looking for better technology coverage to an internationally recognised esports broadcaster shows what can happen when a woman builds the media platform she wishes existed, and then uses it to bring other women into the room.