Stephen Ndele
Stephen Ndele grew up in rural Kitui with his grandmother while his mother worked in Nairobi. He moved to the city for high school in 2009, but lack of fees forced him to drop out twice. Then a Catholic charity gave him a voucher that got him into Brain House Academy in Mathare North. He walked more than an hour each way to school, timing his departure to avoid the rains. After finishing in 2012 with grades good enough for Kenyatta University, he couldn't afford to enroll. But he had to support his siblings, so he took a construction job. “I felt like this work was killing me,” he said. “My body was small. I couldn't sustain that lifting.” He switched to security work, choosing the night shift because he felt ashamed that he hadn’t fulfilled his academic promise. A friend's in-law who worked at Digital Divide Data heard about his situation and connected him to the organization in December 2014.
He started as a data entry clerk earning 9,000 shillings (around $70) a month, learning to type from scratch. DDD helped him secure loans to finally enroll at Kenyatta University in 2016, inspired by his work at DDD to study IT. In 2017, he joined DDD's cloud technology program with AWS. He was laid off in 2019, but an employer who'd heard about his cloud skills hired him within minutes of watching him diagnose a server problem—and later paid his final semester fees. His cloud expertise carried him to Cellulant as a support engineer, then to Safaricom in 2024 as a cloud engineer, joining fellow DDD alum Maureen Chebet. The generosity he experienced inspired him to join Rotary International, where he led a project installing a computer lab at Embakasi Primary School so students could stop learning about computers from blackboard drawings. "The sky is no longer the limit," he says, describing what DDD did for him.
