The stress level: innovation and company.
If the GirlCoder Membership is the place the pipeline begins, the GirlCode Hackathon is the place it faces its first severe take a look at.
On 19 and 20 September 2026, Truecaller is co-sponsoring GirlCode’s annual hackathon for 18-25-year-olds. This can be a 30-hour, all-women, coding marathon bringing collectively 100 feminine builders, knowledge scientists, UX designers, and entrepreneurs. This 12 months’s innovation goes additional: slightly than constructing hypothetical options, contributors will probably be paired instantly with feminine tech founders to co-develop Minimal Viable Merchandise for actual SMEs going through actual challenges.
GirlCode is internet hosting this hackathon in 9 nations throughout Africa concurrently. The dimensions is extraordinary, however what I discover most compelling is the person expertise it creates – the younger girl who arrives not figuring out if she belongs, who works by means of the evening on one thing she has by no means constructed earlier than, and who pitches it the subsequent morning with the form of quiet certainty that comes from having proved one thing to herself.
Hackathons, when carried out properly, create proof. They offer younger girls one thing to level to and say: I constructed this, I solved this, I earned my place right here. And in an trade the place belonging remains to be contested for girls – notably for Black girls, who face compounded boundaries of financial marginalisation and legacy education inequality – that proof issues enormously.
The retention hole: the half we do not speak about sufficient.
There is part of this pipeline that receives the least consideration: whereas we make investments closely in getting girls into tech, we make investments comparatively little in preserving them there.
The ladies who make it into senior digital roles – those who’ve navigated the tutorial hole, the office tradition, the casual exclusions – typically discover themselves remoted otherwise. They’re economically lively, they’re seen, they’re additionally incessantly with out the form of group that sustains folks by means of the troublesome center of a profession: the peer group who shares their language, their pressures, their particular expertise of navigating establishments that weren’t constructed for them.
That is the issue that Traversing Liminality was constructed to resolve. Traversing Liminality is a Basis that helps younger, African girls aged 21 to 40 throughout 22 African nations to beat limiting beliefs, deepen self-mastery, and entry alternatives for private {and professional} progress. On the coronary heart of their work are the regional connects, that are localised gatherings in Johannesburg, Cape City, and KwaZulu-Natal that perform as anchor areas the place girls who’ve accomplished Traversing Liminality’s fellowship programme can proceed to have interaction, replicate, and help each other.
Truecaller is proud to be funding and co-curating these regional connects in 2026. What that appears like in follow just isn’t what you may count on. At our Might join in Cape City, the afternoon started with an Wonderful Race expertise, adopted by a facilitated reflection dialog on main authentically in a linked world, and closed with a session on digital security, id safety, and what belief actually means within the on-line areas that skilled girls inhabit every day.
There may be a lot intentionality concerned in these connects as foster alternatives for honesty and security as stipulations for real progress.
