I’m a wife, mother, and qualified systems analyst who has spent the last 30 years turning ideas into businesses, across textiles, retail, experiential art, and now artificial intelligence. Today I’m Founder and CEO of Hello Aida, an AI tutoring platform built to make quality education accessible across Africa.

I believe I was nominated because my career reflects sustained professional excellence rather than a single success story. Trained as a systems analyst, I have spent 30 years applying that analytical discipline to build and scale six ventures across entirely different industries, textile sourcing, retail manufacturing, experiential events with Artjamming, and Africa’s first metaverse art gallery, each one identified early, built from scratch, and sustained through real market shifts.

That same rigor now underpins Hello Aida, the AI tutoring platform I founded and lead as CEO. I took it from a first line of code to a fully subscribed capital raise and live school deployment in under two years, and it has since been recognised internationally, including as a 2026 Women in Tech Africa Awards finalist for Best Startup. Alongside my executive work, I hold governance positions on the boards of UHS and Ben Gurion University, contributing strategic and technical expertise well beyond my own businesses.

What I believe makes this deserving of recognition is the consistency: three decades of technically grounded, commercially disciplined execution, applied across industries as they changed, and now applied to solving one of South Africa’s most urgent problems, equitable access to education.

Nelson Mandela said that education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world, and that belief drives everything I am building. Professionally, my vision is to scale Hello Aida into the platform that halts and reverses South Africa’s STEM crisis. In 2025, only 4,897 learners nationally achieved a pure maths distinction, down almost 50% from 9,752 the year before, and 8 in 10 Grade 4 learners still cannot read for meaning. That trajectory is not inevitable. With personalised, Socratic AI tutoring delivered in a learner’s mother tongue, we have the ability to reach the 90% of South African students who have never had access to individual academic support, and to change the outcome for an entire generation of STEM students.

My vision also extends beyond the platform itself to the infrastructure that makes it reachable, which is why I am helping champion equitable access to free internet, so that connectivity itself stops being a barrier between a learner and their education.

Personally, I want to keep building at the intersection of technology, education, and community. For South Africa, my vision is a country where a child’s postcode or home language no longer determines their access to a quality education and connectivity, and where the next generation of engineers, scientists, and innovators comes from every community, not just the privileged few.

Recreational activities

Bridge, Gym