Meet the bold queengineer

Martha Nasipwondi Wakoli is an electrical engineer and founder of the free magazine Queengineers. She has worked for Rift Valley Railways, Kenya Power and Virunga Power.

What does Nasipwondi mean?

Nasipwondi means born during sweet potato season. Lipwoni is singular, mapwoni is plural, for sweet potatoes. But I wasn’t even born then, I inherited my paternal grandmother’s name, you know, the way nomenclature is done in African families.

Do you think your name has had an effect on your life? In that how Africans name their children and then the children inhabit the qualities of the person they are named.

I mean, I wouldn’t say all of Africa…let’s see, my grandmother was nice, so I would be lying if I said yes. Ha! She was nice and not rude. To be fair, I didn’t spend enough time with her. She died when I was small, so it is hard to know. I grew up in Nairobi, she lived in Bungoma, where we went to visit every five years, so it is hard to know. Me I don’t know, what characteristics do sweet potatoes have?

Haha, of course. So is it growing up in Nairobi that made you want to become an engineer?

My father taught engineering at UoN for the longest time. When he went to school, UoN was the only place that offered engineering, same way you had to go to a certain university for Medicine, like Makerere, and Dar es Salaam for Law, was it? I was raised in Nairobi, because my parents moved here for university, and then taught it here. We grew up with engineers – my dad, my uncles, their friends. My brother is a mechanical engineer. It is what I knew, earliest.

And what made you decide on your particular discipline?

I didn’t know enough about engineering, actually, to be sure what I wanted to do. I was good at Math and Physics, and I was certain that I didn’t want to do civil engineering. Structures don’t interest me – concrete, buildings, roads, they don’t interest me. I don’t care for houses! And I knew a little bit about civil engineering from one of my superstar uncles. So it was a coin toss between mechanical engineering and electrical engineering. Now machines, machines interest me. My brother had already told me what mechanical engineering was about when he was in school (he’s eight years older than me) so I was like let me do the other one, the option, then we can be a super team. Note, we’re not a super team!

How did you end up working for Kenya Power?

I actually just applied for the work. Kenya Power advertises for graduate engineers every so often, so in 2015, I applied and interviewed and got the job.

I think I speak for most Kenyans when I ask – why Kenya Power?

Because Kenya Power are the only organisation that you can work for and get training in power systems at. The reality in a country like Kenya where distribution of electricity is heavily monopolised is, that the only place you can learn about power systems is the only place that is doing it. There’s no one who loosely has power systems in their house that you can apprentice off of.

Power systems are my specialisation, basically – I am interested in that particular sector. My undergraduate degree was in Heavy Current Electrical Engineering, and then my Masters is in Energy and Sustainability and Electrical Power Engineering. I work on electricity generation, distribution, power lines, things like that. And I am very interested in having more Africans having more electricity, cheaply.

Not to be reductive, but, why should people have power?

Because it is a basic need. It reduces the amount of time that people need to do basic tasks, and higher level things. It’s on the same level, for me, as having water, or having clean toilets. It shouldn’t be an elitist thing, and cost more if you live far, or have more money. It is a basic need.

Then what happened after Kenya Power?

Like I said, I am interested in people having electricity. Kenya Power is focused on urban and peri-urban areas, which means many rural areas are still far removed from the grid. So in the last couple of years, policies, specifically within the energy sector, have allowed increased participation of the private sector for electrification in rural areas. I decided I wanted an opportunity to do more work in rural electrification. The company I joined is attempting to do so.

And somewhere along that path, Queengineers happened?

No, no, Queengineers was before Kenya Power – because of my experience at Railways. I was the only female field engineer at Rift Valley Railways when I started working there in 2013. Working on trains was the coolest thing! But I didn’t have toilets. As in, there were no toilets for women in the field (Here’s a question - how do you menstruate without toilets? In the field?) This is because there was no one in the field - at all - who was female. There were no field engineers who were female, no female train drivers, no female technicians – in fact the only female electrical foreman – they still called her a foreman – in the company was in Eldoret – at least, when I worked there.

I know there are female engineers because I went to school with them. If you ask me, of course, I can give you a whole database. But there is just an obvious lack of representation of them. We are here. But no one is talking about it - or rather, no one is recognising our contribution. It’s kind of like how people say Africans don’t read – don’t say Africans don’t read, say YOU don’t read. Don’t say there are no female engineers, say you don’t know any.

The irony for me here was that the office itself was full of women – in finance, in human resources, but yet the women in human resources weren’t aware of this toilet thing in the field. That was in 2013 – I hope things have changed. Because it is a blind spot, clearly, even for women.

So the short (shorter?) answer to why I started Queengineers is, when I was doing mentorship in high schools, I was quite often the only female engineer these young girls had ever met. I wanted to document more engineers because I didn’t want them to have a singular perspective – my perspective – of what being an engineer meant. I wanted to provide a broader narrative – after all, being an engineer is just the work that I do. There is so much more to me, to us. We are people. We like other things.

It was to show girls that you can be another person. The schools I go to – like Kenya High, Loreto Limuru, Precious Blood, schools like that – there is a very real pressure to excel at all costs. And so the students I meet there ask me questions like, can I be an engineer if I am not number one in Math. I was never number one in Math! I get asked, I also like music, can I still do music. You know what they knew me for in Kenya High? Drama and Choir. Extra-curriculars are so important. We need to also allow young girls to be interested in more than one thing, and understand that that is not necessarily incongruous. I realize the privilege I have in saying so but even beyond this, we need to allow other girls to have this same privilege, which is a deeper systemic issue – we want girls to read, but there are no libraries, we want girls to get into STEM, but there are no labs. We want girls to be able to go to school and thrive but in this 2020 girls still have to buy sanitary towels or not go to school.

What I’m saying is, you can like singing, you can like writing, you can like tinkering. But you don’t have to only be a singer, or only a writer. You can like all of them and they can co-exist. You don’t have to be just the one thing.