June 21, 2022
Norah Magero Wins Royal Academy of Engineering’s 2022 Africa Tech Prize, Aided by Special Collaboration Between IMPEL and Techwomen Program
This June, Norah Magero, CEO and co-founder of the NGO DropAccess, TechWomen participant, IMPEL mentee, and engineer, was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Africa Tech Prize for Engineering Innovation. The prize is Africa’s biggest for engineering innovation and has an eight-year track record of awarding engineers who go on to boast great success. Magero won the prize for her invention Vaccibox: a solar-powered, mobile medical fridge which can be used to transport vaccines to rural communities and remote clinics. The prize will gift Magero, and Vaccibox, with £25,000 (US $33,514), in addition to the eight months of training and networking she received while under consideration for the award.
The IMPEL team recently had a chance to sit down with Norah and talk about Vaccibox, the Africa Tech Prize, her time in the Bay Area, and what she’s doing next.
Norah felt her time at IMPEL was instrumental in her winning the prize. Speaking about the program, Norah said that while the TechWomen program helped her learn how to become a better storyteller when it comes to talking about her work, IMPEL helped her develop the pitch deck she ultimately used during her pitch for the Royal Academy of Engineering’s panel finalist presentation, delivered to both judges and a live audience who voted for the most promising innovation.
Norah confided that she had initially felt skeptical when going through IMPEL’s training to develop a pitch that would work “anywhere,” for a variety of audiences. That perception changed as her mentorship progressed under Reshma Singh, who serves a dual role at Berkeley Lab as a TechWomen mentor and director of the IMPEL team. Norah received the expertise to help guide first-time technologists towards successful pitching and commercialization. Norah felt like she learned exactly how to communicate effectively and precisely.
“I’m an engineer by profession,” she leveled, “and we tend to be too tactical.” IMPEL helped her “bring the personality and the humanity” behind the technology, balancing the “nitty gritties of technical details.” That was something Norah felt was critical in helping her win the Africa Tech Prize; “I was quite conscious that, yes, I'm an engineer and this is a product that we know is good. But there's the audience that just wants to follow our journey, this story, [so they can] take interest in what the product is about. That is one thing I learned from IMPEL that has really, really been big, been vital.”
She also emphasized how IMPEL helped her better understand investor outlooks and approaches. “[IMPEL] exposed us to different ways of how investors actually look at our projects and disseminate whether it's a go or no-go– that is something that the program gave me: a view of what the reader sees or rather how they perceive my enterprise.”
Overall, Norah maintained that the biggest thing IMPEL changed for her entrepreneurial journey, aside from the invaluable training and coaching, was the mindset shift and worldview-broadening the experience gave her. “For a very long time I felt like my vision was a bit narrowed, because I'd never really stepped out of Kenya. Most of the connections that I would tend to work with were those within my geographical reach. But then going through and meeting so many people through the IMPEL program, through the TechWomen program at Berkeley, [it] just opened up so many possibilities of collaborations.” Norah’s time at IMPEL really changed her approach to entrepreneurship and its possibilities for building better futures. “I am not the only one … building my organization– there are so many people who are collaborating and partnering and extending ideas and knowledge and doing so much technology transfer [so] that [they] impact as many lives as possible.”
Building better futures is something close to Norah’s heart and goals. As the first Kenyan and second woman ever to win the Africa tech Prize, she feels “awesome”, and “so encouraged”, too. Norah expressed a hope and desire to see more women, and more Kenyans, involved in tech going forward. “In African countries, [I have] not always encouraged to focus or invest in technology spaces,” especially as a woman. She also emphasized the importance of having women in leadership roles in climate, energy, and tech sectors. “[Women] are the biggest interactors [in climate and energy sectors], they’re the ones who should [be] involved in research, development, manufacturing, and design.” Norah noted that many of the mentors in her life were women, who have been instrumental in her continued work in these sectors, despite the challenges.
“It's quite a lonely journey in entrepreneurship. It'd be good to have more women [to support] when [you] feel like, ‘I want to give up, I don't want to do this anymore’. I’d like to have women with real life stories of a way [through it].” And how can we get more women into entrepreneurial, climate and tech spaces? “More women [being] funded in this sector”.
Norah would like to see more women be able to maneuver through careers such as hers–while navigating career-impacting situations such as pregnancy–without being cast aside or “falling out of the innovation space or startup world.” Through her work, she is paving the way for fellow women and Kenyans to join her in entrepreneurial climate and tech spaces.
When asked about the future of Vaccibox and her own career, she comments, “in the next year, I definitely see Vaccibox being used all over Africa, beyond just Kenya. Hopefully in the next five years, we can also find our space in Southeast Asia and the global south. We’re going to who knows where else, but we want to ensure that it's distributed and complies with the regulations and the standards.” Additionally, “I’d like to transfer all my knowledge and experience to a global space… to bridge the gap that exists between the global policy makers, and those who are implementing this work at grassroots levels.”
