WAAW Foundation

WAAW Foundation — Working to Advance STEM Education for African Women — is an international nonprofit founded in 2007 and headquartered in Abuja, Nigeria, with additional registration in the United States, Rwanda and South Africa. Its mission is to empower African women and girls to become transformative leaders through hands-on STEM education, leadership development and entrepreneurship training. The foundation now operates across more than two dozen African countries and supports a network of over 50 university STEM chapters run by past and current scholars.

WAAW Foundation funds its scholarship because, in its own words, "hundreds of brilliant young women across Africa dream of pursuing careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics but financial barriers stand in their way." The organisation was built specifically to close that gap: STEM fields remain heavily male-dominated across the continent, and WAAW's founders identified funding, mentorship and visible role models as the biggest levers for changing that. Rather than a one-off cash grant with no strings attached, the scholarship is structured to build a pipeline of women who go on to mentor the next cohort.

This shows up directly in the scholarship's structure: it does not carry a conventional employment work-back obligation, but recipients must complete a minimum number of community STEM outreach activities to unlock each half of the award, and are expected to start or join a WAAW STEM Chapter at their own institution. In that sense funding is tied to ongoing service to the WAAW community rather than to any employer.

WAAW Foundation is entirely separate from HCI Foundation, the South African trust of the JSE-listed Hosken Consolidated Investments group — the two organisations are unrelated despite both funding education under a "Foundation" name.

Enquiries about WAAW Foundation's programmes can be sent to its scholarships or general contact addresses, both published on its official website.

WAAW Foundation's flagship programme, Working to Advance STEM Education for African Women, runs alongside sister initiatives such as the African Girls Can Code Initiative — delivered in partnership with UN Women and the African Union Commission — and a series of STEM career fairs and coding camps aimed at younger secondary-school girls across the continent. The organisation was founded by Dr Unoma Okorafor after a career in the US technology sector, driven by the observation that African women remained dramatically under-represented in STEM university enrolment despite strong latent interest and ability. WAAW funds its programmes through a mix of corporate partnerships, grants from international development agencies and individual donations, which is part of why an individual award such as this $500 scholarship is modest relative to full-cost tuition bursaries offered by large corporates — the organisation deliberately spreads limited funding across as many recipients as possible rather than concentrating it on a smaller number of full rides.