Njeri Rionge

Njeri Rionge was born in Nairobi in 1964. She became pregnant at seventeen and left school, a setback that in Kenya at the time usually closed off most conventional careers. She supported herself and her child through a series of small businesses, at various points selling yoghurt, ice cream and skin-care products from makeshift stalls, learning trade by doing it rather than through any formal training.

In 1999, with two business partners, she co-founded Wananchi Online, one of the first internet service providers in Kenya, at a time when the country had almost no public internet infrastructure and most Kenyans had never used email. The company started with a handful of cybercafés and grew into a wider communications business, later expanding into pay-television and broadband across East Africa. She left Wananchi in the mid-2000s and went on to found further ventures in retail health clinics and business consulting, aimed particularly at helping other small entrepreneurs get started.

She spoke often and candidly about the teenage pregnancy that ended her formal education, using it in talks to young Kenyan women as proof that an early setback did not have to be a final one. She served on Kenyan government task forces on youth employment and ICT policy.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer, which she also discussed publicly, and died in 2020 in Nairobi at the age of fifty-five.