Nelly Cheboi – The Digital Bridge Builder From Mogoti

Photo credit: TechLit Africa

The Bold Move: Quitting a lucrative software engineering career to found TechLit Africa, an organization that transforms discarded technology into computer labs and digital literacy programs for rural Kenyan primary schools, breaking the cycle of poverty.

The Backdrop of Scarcity

Nelly Cheboi’s story begins not in a world of potential, but of profound scarcity in Mogotio, a rural village in Kenya. Nelly grew up in abject poverty, often going to school barefoot and sometimes scavaging for food in garbage pits. At the age of nine, due to the immense hardship her single mother, Christine, faced raising four daughters, Nelly was forced to take on parental responsibilities for her younger sister.

Her childhood was defined by a harsh reality: watching her mother work tirelessly, often selling vegetables, just to afford school fees—a cycle that often led to Nelly being sent home due to non-payment. This poverty was not a lack of money; it was a systemic absence of opportunity.

The Uphill Climb to Opportunity

Nelly’s intelligence and relentless hard work secured her a full scholarship to Augustana College in Illinois, USA, in 2012. This was her first plane ride, a flight away from the life she knew.

However, the scholarship did not erase the psychological and skill gaps caused by her background. While pursuing computer science, a course she fell in love with after initially struggling with chemistry, she was profoundly behind her American peers. She didn't know how to use a computer terminal, couldn't touch-type, and felt "insufficient" in class. After graduation, she had to practice typing for six months just to pass a coding interview, a humbling experience that sharply highlighted the digital divide.

To survive and send money home, she worked campus jobs, including as a janitor, saving nearly 80% of her minimum-wage income. Her initial goal was singular and deeply personal: to retire her mother. With her savings, she managed to move her family out of their dilapidated home.

The Bold Move (The First Iteration): Realizing that simply sending money home was a temporary solution, Nelly used her early savings to build a low-cost, sustainable primary school in her village called Zawadi Yetu in 2015. This was the first attempt to create a system where none existed, ensuring local control over educational access.

The Moment of Disruption: TechLit Africa

After graduating and beginning a successful career as a software engineer in Chicago, Nelly saw a different form of waste: working computers, perfectly capable by African standards, being routinely discarded by US companies every three years.

For a child in Mogotio who had never seen a computer, this industrial waste was pure, untapped opportunity. Nelly couldn't shake the image of her rural community being locked out of the global digital economy due to this absurd disconnect.

In 2018, she began collecting these discarded machines, hauling 44 computers with her on a single flight to Kenya. This was the birth of TechLit Africa (officially co-founded in 2019 with Tyler Cinnamon).

The final, decisive "Bold Move" came when she quit her well-paying tech job to dedicate herself full-time to the non-profit. She recognized that the true scalable solution wasn't building one school, but providing a sustainable, replicable model for digital literacy across rural Africa using refurbished technology and a curriculum focused on self-efficacy and remote work skills.

Photo credit: CNN

Today, TechLit Africa operates computer labs in dozens of schools, serving thousands of children who now learn coding, music production, and graphic design—skills that directly plug them into the global economy. Nelly Cheboi's dedication to this cause earned her the prestigious CNN Hero of the Year award in 2022. (Source: CNN, 2022)

The Main Lesson

Nelly Cheboi’s journey illustrates that the true engine of impact is not the resource you have, but the gap you refuse to accept. She saw poverty not as a destiny, but as a solvable engineering problem that required two things: access (via recycled tech) and a skill pipeline (via a relevant curriculum). She chose to leverage abundance in one part of the world (e-waste) to address scarcity in another (digital access), proving that scalable solutions often lie in redesigning the system, not just treating the symptom.

What is that one bold move that you have to make in order to get to the next phase of your dream(s)?

You can check out TechLit Africa on YouTube to learn more about the work they are doing in Kenya.