Dorcus Nakachwa is no stranger to giving back to the community.
As an undergrad in Ghana, she volunteered with Future of Africa, an organization dedicated to equipping at-risk youth living in street situations with vocational skills to help break the cycle of poverty.
At McGill, she developed InoGen, a social enterprise to mentor girls in her native Uganda, while earning her master’s in aerospace engineering.
“I had great mentorship, and I knew that I always wanted to live a life that was beyond me. I didn't want to just live for myself,” says Nakachwa, MEng’21, a former performance systems specialist at CAE Inc., a Montreal-based tech company that makes flight simulators. She helped validate and ensure that the simulators performed exactly as an aircraft would.
Nakachwa is also a Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program Alumna, a graduate of the largest scholarship and leadership initiative of its kind in Africa. The Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program has partnered with McGill since 2013 to offer full scholarships to talented young leaders from Sub-Saharan Africa along with leadership training, experiential learning opportunities, and more.
This year, the program entered its second phase at McGill and is open to changemakers from the sub-region at the master’s level who want to improve nutrition, public health, public policy, and sustainable agriculture sectors across Africa. To date, McGill has welcomed 161 Mastercard Foundation Scholars who aspire to give back to the continent.
Cultivating the next generation of Ugandan women in STEM
In Nakachwa’s case, she is trying to address the under-representation of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) studies in Uganda. Her startup, InoGen, focuses on mentoring high school girls with a keen interest in STEM.
The guidance she was fortunate to receive is lacking for many people, she says, especially in rural Uganda and even parts of Kampala, the capital city where she grew up. “Not a lot of information is dispatched so people don't know that opportunities are out there.”
“We noticed that there are other women in STEM or in business who are willing to pay it forward and give back,” Nakachwa says. InoGen pairs these mentors with girls yearning to work in STEM.
“InoGen stands for ‘Innovative Generation.’ Our mission is to cultivate the next generation of innovative women who are unlimited by what they can accomplish in STEM,” says Nakachwa, who also serves as a mentor.
Nakachwa co-founded InoGen while at McGill, participating in the McGill Dobson Cup, the University’s annual flagship startup competition, a 10-week program that includes workshops and coaching. “InoGen is a social enterprise, so we are more about social impact. But we also need to make sure that we are sustainable because we want to be able to deliver this impact in the long run. Listening to people tell you how other organizations are doing it was a great process.”
InoGen won the $15,000 Mastercard Foundation-Dobson Startup Award at the competition. “We've been able to get other funds because of that. It's opened doors for us,” she says.
“I'm so grateful for the opportunity of the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program that I was able to get a world-class education,” she says. It wasn’t her first merit-based scholarship; she also earned scholarships through the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program for her high school and undergraduate degree. “A lot of people in that community paved the way for me, so I'm just happy to pay it forward to other girls.”
‘I love to give back to Africa’
An avid reader growing up, Nakachwa loved physics and math. “I remember reading about the likes of Apple and all these other innovations that were happening at the time,” she says. “I like to innovate. I'm very results oriented. I like to do things and felt that being in engineering would allow me to contribute to the doing of things.”
She had wanted to become a pilot and recalls the time a commercial pilot gave a talk at her high school. “He explained a lot of things and I'm like, you know what, instead of flying it, I could make the airplane,” she laughs.
Nakachwa worked at Bombardier on an internship during her time at McGill as an aircraft health monitoring systems analyst – a role that entailed monitoring the aircraft health of the Global 7500 fleet. The University also connected her to a mentor, a McGill alumna who is a senior executive at Pratt & Whitney. She landed her former position at CAE through the Faculty of Engineering’s TechFair. “McGill was very fundamental to my development. It's still very integral to my identity. I’m so proud that I’m a McGillian because it opens doors to job opportunities,” says Nakachwa who has since turned her full attention to InoGen.
Does she envision going back to work in Africa one day?
“Yes, yes, a resounding yes. I would love to,” Nakachwa says.
“I love the continent. I love the people. But also, I love to give back to Africa because I know it's a developing continent and I know that not a lot of people get the opportunity to get the education and the experience that I've gotten now. I'll be happy to go back and give back in any capacity that I can.”
Current and former Mastercard Foundation Scholars at McGill are among the invitees to a special cocktail reception in downtown Montreal on Thursday, October 24, during Homecoming Celebration Weekend. Contact us to learn more about the McGill Alumni Africa Network Launch.