(CNN)Disability doesn't mean disadvantage. And Farida Bedwei, a celebrated software engineer from Ghana, is proof of that.
Born
in 1979, Bedwei was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at the age of one --
cerebral palsy is an incurable neurological disorder that affects body
movement and muscle coordination but does not interfere with the ability
to learn.
Bedwei has steadfastly
refused to let her disability affect her career trajectory. Today, as
the co-founder and chief technical officer of software company Logiciel,
she is considered one of the most powerful women in financial
technology on the continent -- in 2013, South Africa's CEO Magazine
named Bedwei the most influential woman in business and government in
Africa for the financial sector.
Changing people's lives through software engineering 07:57
Her
greatest achievement, Bedwei says, is the development of a cloud
software platform that is being used by 130 micro-finance companies
nationwide. These institutions administer loans to their customers by
sending a code to their mobile phones via SMS. That code can be
exchanged for money at any branch, making small loans available
immediately.
Here, Bedwei reveals how tech can transform lives and how she defied the odds to find success.
Create an education plan that works for you.
Bedwei lived a nomadic childhood thanks to her father's role at the
United Nations Development Programme. As a result, the family resided in
Dominica, Grenada and the United Kingdom before finally settling in
Ghana when Bedwei was nine years old.
Bedwei
was home schooled until the age of 12, and then continued her education
at a government school where she was able to socialize with other
children. Her family noticed her passion for computers, so it was
decided for Bedwei to skip senior high school and enroll in a one-year
computer course at the St. Michael information technology center. At 15
years old, she was one of the youngest in the class. A challenge,
perhaps? But one she took in her stride.
"I'm
sure most of my classmates were wondering what I was doing with them.
And that it how I started my career as a software engineer because
through that course I realized what aspect of IT I was going to
specialize in. I loved the idea of solving problems and creating
things," she says.
Found your dream job? Fight for it.
Following her graduation, the passionate programmer began looking for
work and found her dream role at Soft, a premier software company in the
region.
She recalls: "I went and saw
the head of the technical division and I told him, I want a job here, I
don't have any experience, but I'm inspired to learn... If you give me
the chance, I promise you that you'll never regret it. So he said, 'OK,
fine... come and join.'"
Micro financing app uses 'technology to transform lives' 06:02
Farida Bedwei: What cerebral palsy taught me about life 07:47
Know when you need to move on. Three years later, Bedwei was on the move again and soon found work as a senior software architect at Rancard Solutions.
"I
was with them for nine years. For the first three years of my stay with
them, I was actually going to school part time. I already had a diploma
in Information Systems, but I wanted something else to add to it. I was
doing a diploma in e-technology. That is the web industry... because I
realized that was the way the industry was going. After that diploma, I
wanted to get a degree because I had two diplomas and no degree... and
in Ghana, a degree is what counts."
Don't be afraid to go it alone if you see a gap in the market.
After completing a one-year degree at the University of Hertfordshire
in England, Bedwei returned home with a degree in computer science and
continued working for Rancard. In 2010, she joined G-Life Financial
Services in 2010. The system the company adopted wasn't efficient for
micro-financing, so with Derrick Dankyi, a fellow colleague at the
company, they started building their own cloud software platform called
gKudi.
"It's helping the
micro-financing industry in this country," she says. "It's helping them
make valid decisions on what to do, it's helping them cut out fraud and
it's helping them give loans to people who need loans."
Disability doesn't need to stop you achieving success.
Along with her business achievements, Bedwei prides herself on
inspiring others through organizations like The Girls in ICT Committee
-- a group established to encourage more women to pursue IT careers.
She
says: "I am a role model for a lot of children with disabilities so and
it's very important for me to showcase to the world that... Yes ... You
can have a disabled child and it's not the end of the world. There is
so much that that child can end up doing given the right resources."
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