Driving Feminist Data For Change

East African techpreneur Neema Iyer works at the intersection of data, design, and digital to eventually enable products, policies, and programs that take into account the needs of African women.

- Inaara Gangji

Are gender differences as rife on the world wide web as in the real world? When technologist Neema Iyer returned home to Africa after graduating from Emory University in the United States with a degree in epidemiology and statistics, she was bent on addressing gender from a technology perspective.

Born to Tanzanian and Indian parents and raised in Nigeria, 34-year-old Iyer is today running Policy, a firm she founded in Kampala, Uganda, as a civic technology organization that works at the intersection of data design and technology and understanding how data can be used most effectively for improving service delivery through research, digital literacy, digital security, and products.

When she first touched down, she took up a job in Uganda where she worked in the ICT sector, but under predominantly white, male founders from the West. There was also a lack of touch points in governments with the African context. So Iyer decided she needed a fresh perspective using a gender lens.

“When you really look at it as a lot of technology, a lot of data, the systems are developed in Silicon Valley and I don’t feel that African women are particularly the end-users when they design different technology,” says Iyer.

Policy, funded mostly by grants from big tech like Facebook and Mozilla, more broadly focuses on gendered data and feminist data, that takes into account power dynamics and the person researching.

“If you don’t have this kind of data, then it would be very difficult to make platforms or policies of programs that really take into account the needs of African women and what are the challenges and what are the gaps,” she says.