Naadiya Moosajee was an inspiring guest speaker at the EBE student council’s Celebrating Africa event held on 5 May 2015. She graduated in 2009 from UCT with an MSc (Eng) in civil engineering and is busy completing her MBA. Naadiya is a cofounder of WomEng previously known as SAWomEng. The change of name is due to their expansion into Kenya and they will be opening in Nigeria and Ghana. She had just returned from Washington where she was one of the 21 Millennial Global Leaders who were invited to attend the Atlantic Council’s Millennium Leadership Programme: Enabling Innovative Ideas, Transformational Leadership, and Global Impact.

To find out more about the role of engineers in Africa, Naadiya travelled to 15 countries across the continent. She is very excited and inspired by the prospects of Africa and is passionate about fostering growth and prosperity and developing and mentoring the next generation of youth leaders. She said there are lots of exciting developments going on in Africa and mentioned Rwanda, Ethiopia, Ghana and Angola, who are investing in great infrastructure projects.

She said it is time for a paradigm shift and engineering degrees must be used to create a new future for Africa. Engineers in South Africa need to get into the global development space. The future is in new technologies, the green economy and sustainability. Engineers need to move from being a cog engineer – ensuring things work, to a driven engineer – ensuring growth and development. She encouraged the students to be competitive and innovative. To learn and discover. Experiment and know it is okay to fail. To build a diverse group of mentors and open up their thinking around who their role models are. She left the audience with the question, “How do we raise the conversation on what we are doing and produce engineers who are taking the lead in innovation and development?”