Valentine, The Accountant Who Built Her Own System

A year ago, Valentine described her daily life in one sentence: helping her parents with house chores in Lokori, Turkana County.

She was 24, the third-born of four, a young mother who had finished secondary school in 2019 with a mean grade of C and had never quite let go of a single ambition – to become an accountant. What she carried alongside it was a community that had already made up its mind about her. Mockery. The quiet label of failure, applied for nothing more than becoming a mother early.

Then she applied to the Digital Employability and Entrepreneurship Program. (DEEP)

DEEP is Asante Africa Foundation’s 12-month hybrid program, equipping rural East African youth aged 18 to 24 with digital, career, and business skills. Valentine joined through EmpowerHer, a partnership with Together Women Rise built specifically for young single mothers in rural Kenya – women shut out of the digital economy by poverty, gender norms, and sheer distance from opportunity.

She enrolled hoping for new experience and the confidence to speak up in her own community.

A year later, she has built her own computer programs, learned how to use her voice, and acquired skills that will empower her for the rest of her life.

Katodi SMS

The Katodi School Management System is Valentine’s own product: a web-based administrative platform for schools, written in Python and Flask, with a relational database underneath and a clean, modern dashboard on top. It holds an entire staff registry – teachers, administrators, support workers, transport, and kitchen personnel – searchable in an instant. It tracks enrollment and classroom capacity. It carries the school’s own name and badge.

And at the center of it, fittingly, sits money. The system totals outstanding tuition across the whole student body in real time, posts fee payments against balances, separates cleared accounts from arrears, and hands a head teacher a live picture of the school’s finances without a single manual ledger.

The young woman who wanted to be an accountant built the books.

She designed it for schools like the ones around her, where records live in exercise books and a single fee balance can take an afternoon to trace. The ambition now reaches past her own career to the young mothers watching her, and to what her work quietly proves about every label she was handed.

Her advice to them has not changed since the day she applied.

“Never give up. Stay focused, stay strong, and keep working hard. Your dreams are still valid.”