Susan Gatura

I built Phoenix because I know what it costs to break into data without a map. I am self-taught. I learned on the job across more than twenty African markets, at companies like M-KOPA, Jumia and MultiChoice, with no bootcamp and no formal training to hand me a shortcut. Phoenix is the initiative I wish had existed when I was starting out.

What began in 2022 as a single WhatsApp group is now a community of more than 15,000 people, and Phoenix Cultivate Academy is the training engine at the centre of it. We have trained over 2,000 people in practical data skills, mentored more than 200 professionals through our mentorship programme, and supported over 100 community members into jobs. Our campus ambassador network reaches students across eight Kenyan universities, and we work alongside more than 90 mentors and over 14 corporate partners.

What sets the work apart is the range of ways people can learn with us, depending on where they are starting from. Someone building from the ground up can join a structured bootcamp like Launchpad and move month by month from data foundations into SQL, visualisation and applied analytics. Someone who needs one skill quickly can take a single-topic workshop in Excel, SQL or Power BI. Someone who wants to build can join a masterclass and walk out of the session with a real project in hand, whether that is a web scraper in Python or a working ETL pipeline. We also run corporate trainings for teams at every level, executives included. Across all of it we teach on African datasets, so people practise on the kinds of problems they will actually solve at work.

I am proudest of what happens after the learning. We do not stop at teaching a tool. We mentor people, put them in front of employers, and stay with them until the skill becomes an income. That is the outcome I care about most, and it is why I believe Phoenix has earned this recognition.