Shikoh Gitau
Shikoh Gitau is the award-winning CEO of Qhala, a digital innovation company that catalyzes the digital transformation of African organizations. She is also a co-founder and Managing Partner of Q-Ventures, a human capital fund working with African subject matter experts to design tech solutions that address the continent’s most persistent problems.
Q-venture boasts a portfolio of 12 early-stage ventures in various sectors with a bias towards women first-time founders. Shikoh has over 15 years of experience in venture building, research, design, implementation, and management of digital technologies.
Shikoh has nurtured a lifelong career in building tech innovations that solve real-world problems in agriculture, education, health, payments, retail and renewable energies in African and emerging markets. One of these innovations is CEMA, a platform that allows health professionals and health researchers to access government health data for research and to visualize that data in ways that tell a story. Data modelling and visualization from CEMA informed the strategy of the government of Kenya in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
During her time at the Microsoft, Google and the African Development Bank (AfDB), Shikoh influenced governments in Africa and emerging markets to adopt tech to effect service delivery. Shikoh developed the Digital Government Blueprint, a strategic document to guide governments in digital transformation, now adopted by Smart Africa.
Shikoh holds a PhD and an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
