We Cannot Build South Africa's Digital Future On Half A Workforce

There is a number I think about often: 13%. That is the share of South African STEM graduates who are women, at a time when the global average sits at 35%. And in a country that has staked its economic future on a R50 billion digital infrastructure drive over the next three years, and where digital public infrastructure underpins almost everything that matters – healthcare, financial inclusion, education, safety – we are planning a future that excludes most of our talent.

The numbers compound: of the 236 000 ICT roles in South Africa, only 24% are held by women; just 5% of ICT CEOs are female; and women represent only 30% of AI roles. We call this the “leaky pipeline”: the phenomenon by which girls and women enter the digital economy at every level, and are lost at every critical transition point. Some leave because the pathway in never existed; some leave because the workplace they arrive at was designed for someone else; some leave – and this is the part we talk about the least – because there is no community to sustain them once they get there.

At Truecaller, our mandate is built on trust. Trust in identity. Trust in communication. Trust that when a call comes through, you can know who is on the other end. It is a deceptively simple idea that turns out to touch almost everything about how people participate safely in digital life. So when we designed our CSI strategy for South Africa in 2026, we asked a version of the same question: who is not being trusted with a place in the digital economy? Who is not being communicated to as a future builder, rather than a future consumer? 

The entry point: where the pipeline begins.

Earlier this year, Truecaller partnered with GirlCode in a 9-month-long coding and digital skills training programme for 55 girls in Grade 8 (30 girls) and Grade 9 (25 girls) at Eqinisweni Secondary School in Ivory Park. The “GirlCoder Club” focuses on introduction to coding in year 1 and continues to advanced coding until Grade 11, and involves weekly coding classes, access to a gamified e-learning platform, hands-on projects, and digital badges. We believe that by diversifying the entry pipeline and creating early exposure to technology, we will widen the funnel of technology professionals. The GirlCoder Club culminates with a career fair which includes 35 other schools focusing on career exhibitions, an inter-school, app building competition, and motivational speakers. 

We see GirlCode as the partner of choice as they have been doing this work for a decade. They operate across six countries on the African continent, with 53 public and private sector partners, and have more than 90 000 beneficiaries. Their insight is simple and rigorous: if you want women in tech, you cannot begin the intervention at 22. You must begin the journey at a basic education level. 

The pressure point: innovation and agency.

If the GirlCoder Club is where the pipeline begins, the GirlCode Hackathon is where it faces its first serious test.

On 19 and 20 September 2026, Truecaller is co-sponsoring GirlCode's annual hackathon for 18-25-year-olds. This is a 30-hour, all-women, coding marathon bringing together 100 female developers, data scientists, UX designers, and entrepreneurs. This year's innovation goes further: rather than building hypothetical solutions, participants will be paired directly with female tech founders to co-develop Minimum Viable Products for real SMEs facing real challenges.

GirlCode is hosting this hackathon in nine countries across Africa simultaneously. The scale is extraordinary, but what I find most compelling is the individual experience it creates – the young woman who arrives not knowing if she belongs, who works through the night on something she has never built before, and who pitches it the next morning with the kind of quiet certainty that comes from having proved something to herself.

Hackathons, when done well, create evidence. They give young women something to point to and say: I built this, I solved this, I earned my place here. And in an industry where belonging is still contested for women – particularly for Black women, who face compounded barriers of economic marginalisation and legacy schooling inequality – that evidence matters enormously.

The retention gap: the part we don't talk about enough.

There is a part of this pipeline that receives the least attention: while we invest heavily in getting women into tech, we invest relatively little in keeping them there.

The women who make it into senior digital roles – the ones who have navigated the educational gap, the workplace culture, the informal exclusions – often find themselves isolated in a different way. They are economically active, they are visible, they are also frequently without the kind of community that sustains people through the difficult middle of a career: the peer group who shares their language, their pressures, their specific experience of navigating institutions that were not built for them.

This is the problem that Traversing Liminality was built to solve. Traversing Liminality is a Foundation that supports young, African women aged 21 to 40 across 22 African countries to overcome limiting beliefs, deepen self-mastery, and access opportunities for personal and professional growth. At the heart of their work are the regional connects, which are localised gatherings in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and KwaZulu-Natal that function as anchor spaces where women who have completed Traversing Liminality’s fellowship programme can continue to engage, reflect, and support one another. 

Truecaller is proud to be funding and co-curating these regional connects in 2026. What that looks like in practice is not what you might expect. At our May connect in Cape Town, the afternoon began with an Amazing Race experience, followed by a facilitated reflection conversation on leading authentically in a connected world, and closed with a session on digital safety, identity protection, and what trust really means in the online spaces that professional women inhabit daily. 

There is much intentionality involved in these connects as foster opportunities for honesty and safety as prerequisites for genuine growth.

What this is not.

Plugging the leaky pipeline requires working at every point where the leak occurs. It requires intervention at age 8. It requires creating pressure-testing environments at 22. And it requires, just as urgently, building the structures that keep women in the room at 35 and 40 — not because they need saving, but because the talent that has already made it into the pipeline deserves the community and infrastructure to stay.

This work is not charity. It is not corporate social investment as brand decoration. It is not a Youth Month graphic and a hashtag. It is a recognition that Truecaller's long-term commercial success in South Africa is inseparable from the health of the digital ecosystem in which we operate. An ecosystem where women are locked out of building roles is an ecosystem that produces worse technology, serves fewer people well, and ultimately undermines the trust infrastructure on which our entire product depends. Empowering women in tech is not a social good separate from our business. It is part of what our business is for. 

South Africa has declared its ambition for a R50 billion digital infrastructure drive over the next three years. That infrastructure will need to be built, managed, secured, and innovated. It will need people who understand the communities it is meant to serve. It will need the 55 girls at Eqinisweni Secondary School to still be in the room twenty years from now.

As someone who was exposed to coding in high school in 2003, and was probably one of only eight girls in my grade who took it up, I can safely say that now, 23 years later, 13% is simply not good enough. 

We know that, and we're working on it.

Mmathebe Zvobwo is a Chartered Accountant, technology executive, board member, and entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience at the intersection of innovation, financial inclusion, entrepreneurship, and economic development across Africa. She is deeply passionate about the role of technology, entrepreneurship, and innovation in addressing Africa’s most pressing development challenges, particularly poverty, inequality, and economic inclusion.

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