Merely looking at his profile makes us wonder what has been taking all your time; you also wonder why one person has so many awards and you are only coveting just one that you won many years ago. But this is a discussion for another day.
Joshua Okello is the Senior Manager, Partner Engineering at Andela, where he provides leadership and strategic direction to a team of 5 direct reports and approximately 50+ remote software engineers.
10 other things we know:
- He is passionate about improving the status quo. ‘An improving world is one that I would rather be part of‘.
- Alongside his partners, Tushabe and Josiah Kuvuma, Joshua developed WinSenga, an innovative low cost mobile antenatal diagnosis tool. The low cost smart phone-based tool enables less-trained midwives in low resource settings (rural areas) in Africa to effectively and accurately monitor the health of an unborn child during antenatal care and labour. The innovation is the advanced version of the 19th century pinard horn used by midwives to listen to the heart rate of a foetus during pregnancy.
- The then three students from the Makerere University College of Computing and Information Sciences (Joshua, Tushabe and Joshua Kuvuma) won the Microsoft Imagine Cup Grant worth $50,000 for their project WinSenga.
- He was one of the finalists of the innovation Prize for Africa (IPA) 2014. The African Innovation Foundation (IF) announced the Ten African innovators who had created practical solutions to some of the continent’s most intractable problems, from a domestic waste biogas system to a wafer matrix for paediatric antiretroviral (ARV) drug treatment.
- The 29-year-old is the prize winner of The Future Awards Africa in Technology, 2014.
- He was a runner-up in pitching competition, Oxford-Africa Innovation Fair at the Oxford Africa Business Network and Oxford Africa Society at the Oxford Africa Conference, 2015.
- His startups WinSenga/Cipher256 was one of two non-European startups to have been selected to participate in the 15th generation of Startup Chile (2016), a seed accelerator based in Santiago, Chile.
- In 2017, he was a panelist at eHealth Forum on improving access to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) information through ICT-based innovations.
- Alongside his partners for Safe Pal, Joshua was profiled, in 2019, as of ten inspiring and talented youth making a difference with their unique skill sets.
- Since 2010, he has worked on innovative web and mobile products/services on 4 continents – from empowering midwives to monitoring labour more efficiently with their low-end smartphones, and improving the continuum of care around the time of birth, to sales management systems, to accessible and affordable family planning methods for mothers who need it most.
Joshua Okello is the future!
