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| Gibson Munene Njine at his African Leadership Academy graduation, Johannesburg, June 2019 |
Gibson Munene Njine is 28 and writes software in Redmond, Washington, for Microsoft. He grew up in Kirinyaga.
He sat KCPE in 2012 at Archbishop Gitari Boarding School in Kirinyaga and came first in his school with 405 marks. That is how he got into Alliance High School, which in Kenya needs no explanation — admission on examination results and nothing else, which means a child from anywhere in the country can end up sitting next to a child from anywhere else.
"Alliance is where I found out what competition actually was," he says. "You turn up thinking you're clever because you were the cleverest person in your primary school, and then you meet four hundred other people who were also the cleverest person in their primary school."
He is careful about how he describes that. "It isn't a story about being exceptional. It's a story about a system that let a kid from Kirinyaga sit an exam and be judged on it. That system exists in Kenya. It doesn't exist everywhere."
Johannesburg
From Alliance he went to the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, a pan-African institution that recruits students from across the continent for a two-year programme in leadership and entrepreneurship.
Two years in a school full of people from forty-odd countries changed what he thought was normal.
"Everyone had a thing they were angry about at home, and everyone assumed they'd be the one to fix it. Nobody thought that was unusual. You absorb that."
In his final months at the academy, he and his friend Gerry Migwi wrote a voting system on a blockchain: an organiser uploads the roll and the candidates, every registered voter gets a link by email, and each vote is validated in the open before it is written down. It was a student project, but not a hypothetical one — they ran a student election on it, with real voters and a real result.
"I wasn't trying to fix a Kenyan election. I was twenty-one. I wanted to know whether you could build a count that nobody has to be trusted to report honestly — because that's the actual problem, isn't it. Not the counting. The reporting."
His own version of it was OpenFarm, a marketplace he built from South Africa aimed at the Kenyan market, meant to connect farmers directly to buyers over WhatsApp and M-Pesa and cut out the brokers taking most of the margin. It took him, in 2019, to the Watson Institute in Boulder, Colorado, on a fellowship he was selected for from nearly 400 applicants across more than 60 countries.
The scholarship
Njine with his Celipa co-founder Mpho Montsho at Babson commencement.
He then went to Babson College in Massachusetts as a Global Scholar. The programme awards a four-year, full-tuition scholarship each year to a small group of international students, with further grants towards housing, books, insurance and travel for those with greater need. Babson has run it since 2014; its scholars have come from more than 45 countries.
"I couldn't have paid for Babson. Not a portion of it," he says. "Somebody made a decision to fund a student from Kirinyaga and everything that's happened since sits on that decision. I think about it more than is probably healthy."
He graduated magna cum laude in December 2023 with a degree in business administration, alongside an engineering certificate from the neighbouring Olin College of Engineering.
Most of what he now does for a living he learned outside that syllabus. In his second year he co-founded Celipa, a bill-splitting app that Apple approved for the App Store in September 2022 and that recorded more than 600 downloads. He worked on the backend, the admin dashboard and the mobile app.
Seattle
Njine joined Microsoft full-time in January 2024, after two summer internships, working on backend platform and cloud infrastructure.
He goes back to Kenya when he can, and is direct about what he thinks the country is short of.
"It isn't talent and it isn't ambition. I've never met a shortage of either. What's short is the first person willing to take a chance on you when you haven't done anything yet. I got four of those and I didn't deserve any of them more than the next person did."
He is not especially romantic about how he got there.
"People will tell you it's about hard work. It's partly about hard work. It's also that at four separate points somebody I had no claim on decided to give me something — a place, a scholarship, a fellowship, a job. I didn't earn those in any complete sense. I happened to be ready when they came."
He pauses. "Which isn't advice, I realise. I don't know what the advice is. Build things nobody asked you to build, probably, and then be findable."
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