Rose Kimu is that A-grader who scores top marks in KCPE from a public school, goes to a national secondary school, aces KCSE, then lands in university to study computer science.
Medicine? No. Engineering? Didn’t sound right. Law? Still didn’t make her heart beat faster. No one in her family had been in the field of computing, but she wanted to study computers. And computers she got.
In June 2024, she graduated with a computer science degree from the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT).
Now, at 23, she is pursuing her master’s in Rwanda at a university headquartered in the US. There, she is concentrating on software engineering and artificial intelligence (AI).
Artificial intelligence. That destination where everyone in the tech space is running toward, or seeking to perch on. She has been part of a team that made an AI-type bot and she knows the power of AI only too well.
Ahead of the Global AI Summit on Africa (the first of such kind) which happened on April 3 and 4 in Kigali, Rose spoke with the Nation Lifestyle about her life journey and her expectations for AI.
One of the persistent questions of the moment is: Won’t AI render many professionals jobless?
“I agree that AI has replaced a lot of jobs, but I still feel like AI is not yet about to replace us all because AI is still at the point where it still needs data to train,” she said.
Citing cases where write-ups done by AI have been found wanting, she believes it has a lot of ground to cover before it drives humans out of business.
“AI is still at that point where it has not been able to capture the creativity of humans. And that’s why we also have models where we still need humans to look over them and to check what they’re doing so that they don’t make mistakes. So, I don’t think that AI is here to replace humans per se, but I in the next generation of jobs … it’s going to be AI working (side-by-side) with humans,” she said.
Recently, Rose wrote an open letter to African leaders, under the subject of youth inclusion in AI.
In the letter, she noted that African governments are not doing enough to get everyone ready for the AI era. She noted that women, for instance, are scarce in computer-related fields. She gave an example of her JKUAT fourth year class where there were only five women among more than 25 men.
“Across Africa, women face systemic biases in education and employment, making it harder to break into AI, and without their active participation, the technology risks reinforcing these inequalities,” she warned.
Empowering the youth
One of her objectives in writing the letter to was to make African leaders give their youth the “ability to compete in the world” by providing the right support.
Rose was born and raised in Nairobi. For primary school, she was at a crowded public institution.
“I remember at one time, we even had almost 100 students in a class and it was really challenging,” she said.
Regardless, she was determined to excel in the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) examinations and head to Alliance Girls, her dream school. Against all odds, she scored 424 marks out of the possible 500.
However, she somehow missed a spot at Alliance and was placed at Muthale Girls, a national school in Kitui County, from where she sat her Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examinations in 2019, scoring an A- then proceeding to JKUAT.
It was during one of the units at JKUAT that she got to try a hand in making a robotic secretary assistant, and her focus was on responsible AI, inclusivity and data privacy.
“We were working on a secretary assistant so that the real secretary doesn’t have to answer a lot of redundant questions that students usually have — so they can concentrate more on their work,” said Rose. “We are just looking to automate tasks that are redundant and make work easier for humans so that they can concentrate on the things they are really good at.”
In her final year at JKUAT, she worked on a project that involved making a tool that can look at chest x-ray scans and deduce if there is any respiratory disease. This involved training it using many scans.
For her master’s, she is enrolled at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Africa on a full scholarship from the MasterCard Foundation. She is currently the vice president of the Women in Tech Club.
“I graduated from JKUAT in June, and I came here to CMU in July,” she said.
Once done with her master’s, she plans to go up to doctorate level. “I want to do my PhD in human-centred designs. And I would love to contribute to research in that field and especially the intersection of HCI [human-computer interaction] and responsible AI,” she said.
Computer scientist Rose Kimu interacts with a robot in the Social Robotics Lab at JKUAT for her course project.
Photo credit: Pool
So, where does she see herself by 2030? She will be doing a lot of giving back to the community, one way being through her former institutions to inspire others.
Currently, Rose is big on encouraging girls to study science and mathematics plus joining computer-related fields.
“Throughout my education journey people have said there is no way that a girl can be that smart, and that really impacted who I am. So, sometimes, women, even when we’ve accomplished so much, we tend to sell ourselves short because we are taught to hold back,” she said.
Next big thing
“I’m passionate about seeing young girls live up to their potential. I mean, if you’re smart, don’t underplay the fact. If you’re passionate about this, don’t hide your passion because you’re trying to fit in.”
By 2030, she also dreams of being involved in the next big thing for the continent.
“I want to build the technology that drives the next African innovation. For example, we had this mobile money revolution that changed things in Africa,” she said. “I’m not saying that I’ll go to work in mobile money, but I hope to work on another revolution, next innovation in Africa.”
At the moment, she wants African governments to be more proactive in opening the doors for AI.
“I’m passionate about governance. I believe that we cannot sit back because if we don’t have good governance and we still have advancements in AI, it’s not going to work well. We need initiatives from governments that support the adoption of AI, that support start-ups, that support the empowerment of women and men in technology. We need more support for education, for research institutions, more funding so that they can drive these initiatives for the next revolutions,” said Rose.
A big dreamer and a big doer, Rose speaks like an old soul, older than her 23 years of age. Perhaps it is because she is an avid reader.
“I love reading. I love literature, it’s shaped who I am. And I’m a very curious person,” she said.
What's her favourite literature genre? She has two. One of them is fantasy “mainly because it allows me to live in a world full of fairies, unlike the real world”.
The other is African literature, where the likes of Chimamanda Ndozi Adichie, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Joan Thatiah among others jumped into her lips. “I love reading stories that feel relatable,” she noted.
