By Wallace Kantai (email the author)
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Posted Friday, August 28 2009 at 00:00
A friend leading by example.
Remember Oprah Winfrey’s Leadership Academy? The school for girls in Johannesburg that was designed to be the showpiece for the education of underprivileged girls?
The South African version of our very own Starehe Boys’ Centre, but built with the millions and attention from the world’s richest black woman.
If you had gone for the school’s opening in January 2007, you would have been dazzled by the stars on display that day. From old stalwarts like Sidney Poitier and Quincy Jones, to newer luminaries such as Chris Rock and Mariah Carey, the gallery of entertainment and civil rights heavyweights present that night —to ‘sindikiza’, if you will, their fellow superstar—was quite amazing.
You would have been forgiven, then, to look past the slight woman circulating in the room, accepting quiet words of congratulations from those in the know. That woman was central to the success of the School, and those congratulating her recognised that fact.
Yes, she is Kenyan, and her name is Hazel Gachoka.
Ms. Gachoka is an executive at Cisco (her present title is Services Marketing Manager), whose career in the company has taken her on an itinerant journey within the United States and all the way to South Africa.
She was responsible for all the IT aspects of Oprah’s school. The system she was in charge of designing and implementing for the school was an enterprise-wide network, which handles all communications aspects for the school, including wireless communication, VoIP, firewalls, content management systems, video conferencing and multimedia. State-of-the-art may be a good way to describe the sort of network that was put together for the students at the academy.
Ms. Gachoka has some firsts to her name that will give you pause, and the most impressive among these is that she was the first Kenyan woman to be certified as a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (the alphabet soup of Cisco certifications is confusing to the layman, but these are among the most sought-after in the IT world, leading as they do to a rather lucrative career — the CCIE is the highest certification among these).
Years ending in nine have been red-letter years for Ms. Gachoka. She left Kenya in 1989, got certified as a CCIE in 1999, and began her green energy venture in Nairobi in 2009. Let’s take each of these in order, shall we?
Hazel is a product of the Loreto Convent/ St. Mary’s network (yes, yet another one) —Loreto Convent Msongari, with her high school education (Fifth and Sixth Form) at St. Mary’s.
She left for the United States at the end of the 1980s to pursue her university education, and enrolled at Jersey City State University to pursue a degree in business, with rather unintended consequences.
Virtual systems
“I intended to complete an undergraduate degree in Business and return home to help my parents run their business. That did not happen. Instead I graduated in Computer Science and right after that completed a Master’s in Computer Science,” she says.
She decided that one Master’s degree was not enough, and promptly enrolled at the Stevens Institute of Technology, this time for a Master’s in Telecommunications.
Part of the motivation for the second Master’s is that SIT is at a level to be often mentioned in the same breath as its more famous peers such as MIT and Caltech).
From this followed a career in Liz Claiborne— the luxury goods retailer, helping to design their data mining and warehousing system, as well as a system to help manage their sales system across the United States; MCI Worldcom (which was the big player in telecommunications at the turn of the century).
The Cisco certification in 1999 enabled her to make the leap into Cisco proper, joining the company at its Massachusetts office and then at headquarters in Silicon Valley.
The role involved designing and implementing systems for institutions ranging from JP MorganChase, to the Bank of Tokyo, the NASDAQ exchange, to Rutgers University and Foxwoods Casinos.
Cisco is perhaps the global pioneer in creating and deploying virtual teams, which cut across the company and geographical boundaries —where teams are constructed as and when competencies are required, and whose reporting structures stretch across the world. Being part of such a team is what led Ms. Gachoka to Johannesburg in 2005.
The sojourn in Johannesburg was perhaps the most interesting for her in terms of the assignments she handled.
In addition to leading the team deploying the network at the Oprah academy, she also led teams that designed and deployed remote learning systems for the Nepad e-schools project (part of an ambitious Nepad effort to outfit schools all over the continent with the means to get maths and science content delivered wireless).
She was also supposed to lead a team to help deploy an IT network that would monitor the pioneering elections in the DRC in 2006, but a dire security assessment led to the scrapping of that assignment.
Pricing models
Her digital photo albums from the time also feature photos of her at the pyramids in Giza and in Addis Ababa, as she helped Egypt Telecom and Ethiopia Telecom deploy new networks that would help them leapfrog from the antiquated systems that were then in use to new, world class systems.
Ms. Gachoka was redeployed back to San Jose at the end of 2007, to be leader of a team that’s responsible for, in her words, “service strategy, definition, development, implementation, management and metrics for services across the network lifecycle.”
The team, which needless to say is a virtual one, launches multi-million dollar systems for customers all over the world, and also develops global service pricing models for use throughout the company.
Ms. Gachoka hasn’t forgotten that she was supposed to come back soon after completing her degree, so as part of the effort in keeping in touch with home, she’s begun a company in Nairobi whose focus is to “deliver clean renewable energy.” Simply put, she hopes to get Kenyans hooked on solar, wind and geothermal energy as the solution to our perennial power crises.
The company has started out small, in the sense that it’s catering to the home and small business market, but her ambitions are much bigger —”renewable energy is where the world’s attention, and its future, lies, and PRCK Energy will be right at the centre of this for the African continent,” she says.
So, look at this page in 2019, when we may be celebrating Hazel Gachoka in the same breath as Oprah Winfrey.
