When Barbra Birungi walks into a room full of startups, investors and coders in Kampala, she rarely looks like someone who’s still negotiating the rules of an industry she helped create.
Her presence is the product of two decades spent stitching together networks, funding pathways and training programmes that have quietly rebalanced the gender ledger in Ugandan tech.
Today she is best known as a founder of Women in Technology Uganda (WITU) and of Hive Colab, the early innovation hub that helped seed an ecosystem but those labels only hint at the work that turned an idea about inclusion into an instrument for economic change.
Birungi’s route into technology didn’t arrive fully formed.
A graduate of Makerere University Business School who later expanded her management perspective at MIT Sloan, she combined technical curiosity with an organizer’s instinct: where others saw fragmented talent, she saw scaffolding that could be built.
In 2010 and the years that followed, as East Africa’s tech scene moved from tinkering to scale, Birungi moved with it, launching WITU to create pathways for girls and women to access skills, mentorship and the soft networks that open doors, and helping to found Hive Colab to give early-stage teams a place to test ideas and find partners.
Those two institutions became mirror strategies: one focused on equity and pipeline, the other on capacity and commercialization.
What separates Birungi’s approach from conventional “training” programmes is the insistence that skills must lead to opportunity.
WITU’s curriculum blends digital literacy with entrepreneurship and placement support; Hive Colab pairs startups with investors and accelerators.
The metrics she quotes to outsiders — thousands trained, hundreds of startups supported, millions in follow-on investment mobilized — are less about vanity and more about proving a model: that inclusion can be measured and that investing in women isn’t charity, it’s growth.
Birungi’s leadership style reflects a conviction that building ecosystems demands both patience and political dexterity.
She is simultaneously a mentor in a classroom, an interlocutor at donor tables and, increasingly, a negotiator with government and institutional partners who control procurement, regulations and public-sector demand for technology.
Her career demonstrates how social entrepreneurs must frequently translate between languages; grant-speak, investor jargon, and the lived realities of young women in peri-urban communities, if initiatives are to survive beyond pilot seasons.
There have been public recognitions as well.
In 2014 Birungi received the Anita Borg Change Agent award, an acknowledgment from the global tech community that her work was creating concrete opportunities for women in computing across Uganda.
Such awards matter less for the medal than for the validation they offer when pitching partners and scaling programmes; they opened doors to fellowships and networks that, in turn, brought resources back to Kampala.
Looking ahead, Birungi’s ambitions are transparently pragmatic. She wants to scale models that work, to embed digital literacy into formal education, and to move more women from freelancing into equity-led startups.
Her story isn’t an argument for a single hero to save the system; it’s a study in how someone with organizing skill, technical credibility and a knack for translation can rearrange incentives so that talent, wherever it sits, has a fighting chance.
For Uganda’s next generation of founders, especially its women founders and, that rearrangement feels less like idealism and more like an opening.
