African Women Have Always Been Engineers

14 Sep 2026

TL;DR

For decades, technology has often been associated with machines, laboratories and formal engineering. But research into rural women at Mali's Office du Niger agricultural project tells a different story. These women adapted tools, reorganised labour and developed practical systems to protect food security in changing conditions. Today, African women such as ALX graduates Carine Umuganwa and Emily Kagalu are applying modern technology to challenges in agriculture, showing that the tools may change, but the instinct to solve problems remains.

What Does it Mean to be an Engineer?

Imagine being told that the work you do every day is simply labour, when what you're actually doing requires you to understand a problem, adapt your tools, change a process and find a better way to make things work.

That was the reality for many rural women in twentieth-century Mali.

Historian Laura Ann Twagira's research on women at the Office du Niger, one of Africa's major agricultural development projects, challenges the conventional way we understand technology. Her work shows that Malian women used seemingly modest technologies including mortar and pestle systems and metal cooking pots while organising labour and adapting their environment to maintain food production and respond to changing conditions.

Twagira calls this “embodied engineering.”

The term matters because it shifts the focus from the machine itself to the knowledge required to use, adapt and improve it. For these women, technology wasn't something separate from everyday life. It was embedded in farming, food preparation, water, labour and survival.

And that raises a question worth asking today: What if African women have always been engineers, but we haven't always recognised their work as engineering?

How Did Malian Women Use Technology to Solve Problems?

They adapted the tools and systems around them to make food production work for their communities. The Office du Niger was established by French colonial authorities in the 1930s as a large irrigation and agricultural project, initially focused heavily on cotton and rice production for export. The project dramatically changed the surrounding landscape and created new challenges for the people living and working there.

Women had to navigate those changes while remaining central to household food production. They adapted.

Research into the project documents women building ways to access irrigation canals more easily and incorporating new materials such as metal pots into their cooking. Those pots weren't simply convenient replacements for traditional ones. They cooked food faster and required less firewood, helping women save time and respond to the environmental pressures created by the changing agricultural landscape.

Young women, particularly brides bringing household goods as part of their dowry, played an important role in introducing these metal pots. Their adoption of the technology changed cooking practices and the amount of time and resources required to prepare food. The innovation was not necessarily in inventing a completely new machine.

It was in knowing what to change, why to change it and how to make it work within an existing system.

After all, that is engineering too.

Why Wasn't this Work Recognised as Technology?

Part of the problem was how technology itself was defined. Colonial observers could view women's reliance on tools such as the mortar and pestle as evidence of technological backwardness. Later development narratives often treated labour-saving technologies as solutions to the supposed burden of women's physical work, rather than recognising the technological knowledge women already possessed.

Twagira's research turns that assumption around. The women weren't simply waiting for someone to bring them better technology. They were already assessing new tools, deciding whether they were useful, adapting them to their circumstances and sometimes changing their own practices around them.

That distinction matters because when we define innovation only as something produced in a laboratory, patented by an inventor or developed by an engineer with a formal title, we can miss a huge amount of technological knowledge happening elsewhere. And women are particularly likely to disappear from that history when their work is categorised as domestic labour instead of technical problem-solving.

What Does this Look Like in Africa Today?

The tools have changed, but the underlying instinct to solve problems using knowledge and technology hasn't. Take Carine Umuganwa, a Rwandan data analytics professional whose work began in horticulture. She was already managing farm data for operational and performance tracking when she started seeing possibilities beyond routine reporting.

Learning data analytics gave her another way to interrogate the agricultural problems she already understood. Today, Carine applies analytics through Inkindi Farm Ventures and her work with the National Seed Association of Rwanda, using data to identify trends, guide decisions and improve performance in agriculture.

Her story is important because she didn't enter technology by abandoning what she already knew. She brought technology to it.

Data became another tool for understanding agriculture more deeply and that is a pattern worth paying attention to: technical skills become especially powerful when they meet contextual knowledge.

What Happens When Technology Gives an Existing Idea the Tools to Become Real?

For Emily Kagalu, the starting point was agribusiness.

She already saw opportunities to improve access, efficiency and organisation within Malawi's agricultural sector. What she lacked was the technical ability to turn those ideas into systems that could work at scale.

Learning software development changed that.

Emily began understanding how digital systems work, how users interact with them and how technology can be directed towards practical problems. She eventually applied those skills to her vision for E.Agro Trade and Investments, using technology to explore opportunities across the agribusiness value chain. Technology doesn't always create the problem-solving instinct.

Sometimes it gives that instinct new tools.

What Can we Learn from the Women who Came Before Us?

The story of the Malian women isn't an argument that traditional tools are equivalent to today's software, AI or engineering systems. It is an argument about how we recognise technological intelligence.

A woman adapting a tool to conserve resources is solving a problem. A farmer using data to understand productivity is solving a problem. A founder designing software around inefficiencies in an agricultural value chain is solving a problem.

The tools differ enormously. The underlying process – observing, understanding, adapting, and improving – connects them.

And perhaps that changes the question we should be asking about African women in technology. Instead of only asking:

“How do we get more women into tech?”

We can also ask:

“What happens when women who already understand Africa's problems have the tools to build solutions for them?”

That question is bigger because it moves the conversation beyond representation and towards agency. It recognises African women not simply as future participants in technology, but as people who have always had the capacity to shape the systems around them. The history of the women at the Office du Niger gives us a reason to look again at what has already been there.

Carine and Emily show us what that problem-solving can look like with today's tools. The technology keeps changing. The ability to figure out what to do with it has been there all along.

The women in Mali’s story remind us that innovation has never belonged to one kind of person or one kind of technology.
Today, access to digital skills gives more Africans the opportunity to turn that same problem-solving instinct into new ideas, careers and businesses.

Explore ALX programmes to find out what you could build with the right skills.