The society in which we live, seems to place a huge limitation on women. In the sense that, it is almost a generally accepted notion that women are not supposed to venture into fields that are regarded as difficult. As such these fields are purely reserved for men. One of such fields is computer software programming.
It seems not all young women will live their lives restricted by the limitation placed on them by the Ghanaian society, one of such brave women is Miss Rasheeda Mandeeya Yehuz.
Rasheeda was a trainee at the recently ended Mobile Web Ghana training session in Kumasi. As an up-coming software developer, her active participation in the training session, clearly displayed her passion for computer software development.
She belongs to a family of four, her parents, her sister and herself with no influence from male siblings, yet Rasheeda tried her hands at an almost male-dominated field. Her love for computers, she says, dates back to her childhood. Being introduced to a computer at the age of 5, she instantly fell in love with it. Though her interest, as she grew over the years was more skewed to the hardware aspect of computer studies, it is not too far from what she is doing now.
Brought up in a good family, Rasheeda had her basic education and Junior High School eductaion in Tamale and then continued to ST. Mary’s Senior High School(Merries) Accra, for her secondary school education. At Merries, she was a general science student and was appointed a sports prefect in her final year.
After her Senior High School education, Rasheeda decided to pursue a 4 year degree course in computer science at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. Like any other first year student, she faced a lot of challenges in most of the courses especially in programming. She recalls of being totally motivated by what one of her lecturers told her in connection to the fact that nobody can become a good computer scientist without being well-versed in programming. She then took it upon herself to devote one vacation solely for the mastery of a few computer programming languages.
Motivation has played an integral role in this young lady’s life. According to her, support from her family has kept her going all these years and also the success story of Mark Zuckerberg(the founder of facebook) has been great motivation for her. One of the many factors that spurs Rasheeda on in her field of endeavour is the fact that in her class, out of 35 girls only 3 are into programming. She has therefore taken up the responsibility of being a pacesetter to the many girls all over the world who would like to pursue a career in software related jobs.
Some of the software developed by Rasheeda are – a program to mark multiple choice questions in c++ console, a program to take care of banking transactions in c++ console, a web browser (snapSO web browser), an advanced calculator, an automatic shutdown manager (SnapSO Shutdown manager) etc. It is worthy of note that Rasheeda is also into video game creation. She has successfully designed a 3D game called ‘Buju Hunt’ which she displayed at the KNUST TRATECH fair to the admiration of the many who saw it.
Her participation in the Mobile Web Ghana training session is highly commendable. This only re-affirms her dream of going into Mobile App development in the near future. She could not help but express her gratitude to Mobile Web Ghana for putting together such a program for young developers. According to her she benefited a lot, because she was taught how to program SMS and voice applications. You are not far from right if you foresee Rasheeda venturing into the mobile app industry in this country because she is actually working on one together with her team. To Rasheeda, we say ‘kudos’ and we wish you all the best in the projects you are yet to work on.