5 African Googlers You Should Know

By Juliet Guilles

Google has over the years grown into a large giant in the tech world, dominating and holding sway as the number one search company in the world.

In this piece, we take a look at 5 African Googlers who are doing it their own way and making the continent proud.

Olza Sadiq
Olza Sadiq’s path to Google was via the Google Student Ambassadors (GSA) program at university, followed by a stint as a project and campaign manager at a digital agency. After contacting the Googler who led the GSA program at the time, this led to her accepting a position as a Strategic Partner Manager at Google, where she was involved in helping to establish partnerships to provide public Wi-Fi in Nigeria. She then transferred to the two-year Associate Product Marketing Manager (APMM) program and currently works in Lagos. However, she will soon to transfer to London, as the program involves rotating through different teams within Marketing to gain experience and build skills. She currently works in the Growth Lab team as a Growth Strategist, which works with product marketers to develop strategies and campaigns to improve understanding and use of Google products. She will focus on the Northern, Central and Eastern Europe markets and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Andrew Kamau
Andrew Kamau is a Product Manager in Nairobi, who works “on the Privacy team for Chrome Browser”, supporting his team to deliver “product features that help our users … feel safe while using Chrome”. The team of engineers, designers and product managers anticipate users’ needs and design product strategy accordingly, in line with the company’s mission. Andrew came to Google with a background in tech startups and and financial technology. He finds the responsibility of ensuring a safe and realiable product at such a vast scale to be a source of motivation and enjoys working on “technical solutions to … deliver value to our users.”

Awa Dieng
Awa Dieng is from Senegal, but works at Google’s Ghana office, where she is an AI Resident on the Google Brain team. Her works in the research and machine learning (ML) field, to ensure that artificial intelligence (AI) systems are “beneficial for everyone”. Her path to Google started with an interest in science and mathematics at school. This led to a government scholarship to study maths, physics and computer science in France, where her interest in (AI) started to develop. That led to an internship with the NANOGrav team at Cornell University, before she moved into an academic role at Duke University. She joined Google in late 2019.

Abigail Annkah
Abigail Annkah’s journey started with her participation in a STEM project, which led to her graduating from the University of Ghana with a Bachelor of Science Statistics degree. She then enrolled in the first African Masters of Machine Intelligence programme at African Institute for Mathematical Sciences. After graduating, she joined Google Research, Accra, as an AI resident and two years later landed a position as a research software engineer. She works on the Google mapping project, known as the Open Buildings Open-access Dataset Project. She helps build “better image segmentation models” to improve Google maps. Specifically, the project “uses AI to provide a digital footprint of building locations and geometry” in Africa. This data is then used, for example, to “analyse the density of the built landscape for environmental science purposes”.

Lerato Seopela
Lerato Seopela is based in Johannesburg, where she works as an APMM on the Ads Marketing team for Sub-Saharan Africa. She has a passion for sustainability and is an inclusivity advocate. Her role includes creating inclusive marketing campaigns, as well as doing research and business training for the LGBTQ+ community in the region. But she is yet to see the inside of a Google office, as she only joined in April 2020, when the global lockdown was already in place. She came to Google after working as a marketing consultant at Discovery Health, followed by a stint in management consultancy.