Farida Bedwei

Farida Bedwei was born in Kumasi, Ghana, and developed cerebral palsy after a bout of fever in infancy that was never properly diagnosed at the time, leaving her family to piece together what was wrong with her walk and coordination as she grew. Doctors and teachers routinely underestimated her, and she has said she spent much of her childhood being treated as less capable than she was.

She found computers as a teenager and taught herself programming, later training formally in software engineering. In 2003 she began building financial software, and in 2011 she co-founded Logiciel, a Ghanaian technology company, where she serves as chief technology officer. Its main product, a core banking platform called Dream Oval, now handles the record-keeping and transactions for microfinance banks and savings institutions across West Africa, giving small lenders software previously only affordable to large commercial banks.

Alongside her technical work she has written a memoir, Definition of a Miracle, and a series of children's books featuring a young girl with cerebral palsy, aimed at changing how disability is talked about in Ghanaian classrooms. She continues to argue publicly that the biggest barrier disabled people face in technology careers is not the disability itself but the assumptions made about them before they are given the chance to prove otherwise.