By Brenda Kageni

Daring to walk down the unbeaten path is the one thing that has defined many achievers. When presented with the familiar and comfortable versus the unknown, Prof Wanja Thairu chose the unknown — and it was then she began a very exciting career journey that is far from over.

Thairu was denied the opportunity to study mathematics and other science subjects at A-Level because, at the time, science subjects were not offered in girls’ schools. That was the first time she encountered discrimination as a woman. In campus, she opted for Economics, Sociology and Geography, graduating in 1968 from Makerere University College.

Market hungry for economist

Kenya’s postcolonial government was starved for manpower so Wanja and three other Kenyans were recruited into the Kenyan Treasury as economists. But the country was not yet ready to accept women in fields that were perceived to be masculine. On the day she reported to the Treasury, as a finance officer, she was told to her face that the admission was a mistake because ‘women cannot handle money’. She was offered work as an assistant secretary in the administration line instead, but she walked out on it.

Prof Wanja Thairu has served as the director of IT in various universities.

She got to work as an immigration officer, and then quit after a month to become a librarian at the University of Nairobi, then a college of Makerere University. She undertook a postgraduate diploma in Library Science. The university library then dispatched the first three university graduates to the UK for training on scholarship, in preparation for the upgrading of the college into full University status.

Tips from abroad

"While abroad, I once visited a university computer centre renowned for a machine that occupied an entire floor of a large building. It was intriguing that work could be done so efficiently using those huge machines. At the back of my mind, I knew that the University of Nairobi would also computerise", she says.

In 1974, she started her Masters degree in Geography at the University of Nairobi. After a harrowing experience submitting her thesis, she immediately enrolled in a typing school after graduation.

In 1983, while on sabbatical leave, she travelled abroad with her family, and registered for a PhD in Information Sciences (Public Finance) at the University College London (UCL). She was determined to type her own work. But even before she could buy her own computer, her 12-year-old son who was then attending a British school wanted a computer to do his schoolwork. Thairu bought her first computer and with her typing skills, was soon to learn how to use the BBC Personal computer.

She explains the thrust of her PhD research: "If records of pre-independence Kenya had been computerised and adequately backed up, we would have perhaps inherited a lot more of the colonial records than we did, as most were lost in a fire just before independence".

Work in the UK

Thairu worked as a Systems Librarian at one of the North London colleges, where she was in charge of networking six campuses, and training staff and students on using the automated system.

The trailblazer that Thairu is, she saw that the information age was coming and that IT would become an essential survival tool. In 1990, she took her Master of Science in Information Technology (IT) at UCL.

She took up a job with ESAMI (East and Southern African Institute) in Arusha, Tanzania, where she taught short IT courses to senior executives from the region.

She has since headed the IT departments in Kiriri Women University of Science and Technology, Moi University and Kenya Methodist University (KEMU), where she is the ICT Director since April 2008.

Prof Wanja Thairu with Husband, Prof Kihumbu Thairu, and son, Dr Ng’ayu Munga. Pictures: maxwell agwanda/Standard

Thairu is heavily involved in community work, especially giving mentorship talks to schools and encouraging them to develop libraries and computer centres through Computer For Schools Programme.

She says: "It comes from not wanting to see anybody down there. I am always helping somebody, something I learnt from my parents".

Working with sick children

She is also in charge of the an initiative, the Reader to Patient programme, where well wishers read to hospitalised children at hospitals such as Moi Referral and Teaching Hospital in Eldoret, Gertrude’s Garden, Tumutumu, Kikuyu and Kenyatta hospitals. "The response is wonderful. The children just brighten up and get so happy," she says.

Not surprisingly, Thairu has published an anthology of poems titled Millennium Poems, Come Let Us Reason Together: African Poetic Reflections, poems written in the period 1993-1997. She uses her personal experiences to present a provocative non-conformist approach to various issues like population, ethnic conflicts, problems of personal identity, etiquette, behaviour, ambition, religion and racism.

The poems reveal a very human side to Thairu, the Data Structures and Algorithms and Programming lecturer.