Tech Entrepreneur, Disability Rights Advocate, Author
Ghana

Farida Bedwei is a Principal Software Engineer for Microsoft, and former Chief Executive Officer of Byte The Bits, a digitalized data company that helps African institutions and organizations tell stories with the data they generate. She was also previously Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Logiciel (Ghana) Limited, a software company that develops banking systems for the microfinance industry.

Prior to co-founding Logiciel, Ms. Bedwei worked in the telecom software industry, developing mobile gateways and services for mobile networks and content providers. She also served on the Board of Ghana’s National Communications Authority between 2014 and 2016. As Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Logiciel, Ms. Bedwei helped to provide software to over 600 microfinance institutions across Ghana. She believes the informal sector—which in Africa, consists of a large portion of women­—should receive the same standard of banking services as those provided to the formal sector.

Ms. Bedwei is also an author and a disability-rights advocate, whose work has been featured in international and local media. In October 2018, Ms. Bedwei teamed up with Ghana-based games studio Leti Arts to author the first comic book featuring a superheroine with cerebral palsy: “Karmzah.” Ms. Bedwei also founded and hosts “Demystifying Disabilities,” an online show aimed at educating society about disabilities and issues that concern the disability community. She has served on the board of Sharecare Ghana, an NGO which raises awareness for persons with autoimmune and neurological conditions, since 2013.

Ms. Bedwei has won a number of local and international awards and has been recognized as a highly influential woman within the finance sector for her work in computerizing the microfinance industry. Ms. Bedwei was also named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2016.