Patience Ankunda

Founder & CEO Afrocanfit

As a female “sports junky” and fitness entrepreneur, Patience doesn’t fit the prevalent stereotypes about who you should be as a computer scientist.

Patience Ankunda is 24 years old and has grown up in Uganda. Upon completing secondary school, she felt strongly that she should pursue architecture as a career path. She joined a bachelor of architecture in 2016 and worked through it for 2 years until realizing it wasn’t for her. 

She repeatedly came back to an experience she had in school with app development. Patience and a few of her friends took part in a development competition with the aim to solve or manage a problem in their local community. At the time, she felt such things could only be done by computer scientists. 

Her school was very hands-on, spending much of the time teaching others the art of growing banana plants. When the time came to develop an app, Patience wanted to share the experience and knowledge she gained from that process. It was developed with the mission of informing others how to grow banana plants effectively and became ranked as the top project in her country and fourth in Africa.

This gave her the opportunity to fly to San Francisco for the finals and meet a group of extraordinary young girls who had done amazing things with technology. Her perspective on who a computer scientist was, and her own ability to become one, had been greatly shifted. 

She transitioned from architecture to a BSc in Computer Science. She found this switch easy in a personal sense, as she had a keen interest in technology even during her studies in architecture. Upon joining computer science, she felt more inspired and had more time to work on and develop her ideas. She tried out many different sports, and prior to switching courses had really enjoyed Squash. She wanted to focus on it, as she realised that there is no female team for the sport in Uganda. 

This led to a love for all-things fitness, deciding soon after to found a fitness brand entitled Afrocanfit. The mission is to promote fitness in the country by providing affordable, high-quality fitness equipment and home workout programs for others to improve their own personal health and well-being. She would like to match technology and fitness with this brand in the future, using her skills from computer science to develop her ideas in this area. 

Patience finds that there are many people who don’t fully understand what computer science is or what it involves. Unfortunately, there are only a few universities in Uganda that offer an education in computer science. On top of this, she has encountered a persistent stigma around females who are working in computer science; there were as few as five women in her entire computer science department.

She is optimistic that things will change, only that it will take time, sensing that it’s most important to reach children. She explains that there are only one or two programs in Uganda focusing on piquing the interest of children between 6 and 10, while the others focus primarily on 15 and above. Additionally, these only take place in the capital city Kampala, with children in rural areas being almost entirely left out. This shift to reaching others early on would allow them to consider CS as a potential future and perhaps, as Patience has, make lasting improvements from a young age in her country and community.