Student Name: Fawah Akwo
Law School: Georgetown University Law Center
Status: Rising 3L
Undergraduate: B.S. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Home City/State/Country: Limbe, Cameroon, in west Central Africa
Fawah Akwo worked as a senior software engineer at Oracle, where she developed customer relationship management web applications. A hallmark of her life, however, has been a devotion to helping women and children, especially girls. During her time in Silicon Valley, she founded a platform to enable youth in developing countries to organize and garner support for service projects in their communities. An advocate for women’s education, Akwo also founded and coordinates a “GirlTech” scholarship program in her home town to orient and nurture women students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM).
It’s not surprising, then, that as one of Georgetown Law’s Public Interest Law Scholars, Akwo is focusing on women’s human rights and technology law. She split her 1L summer between two nonprofits: The Grameen Foundation in Washington, D.C., and Akili Dada in Nairobi, Kenya.
The Grameen Foundation leverages microfinance, social enterprise, and technology to alleviate poverty around the world. As a legal intern with in-house counsel, Akwo worked to protect the foundation’s mobile health platform, MoTeCH, from legal risks.
Akili Dada is a women’s leadership incubator that seeks to increase the number of women in decision-making roles in Kenya. As a law and policy fellow, Akwo crafted policy that would enable the organization to better collaborate with other Kenyan women’s rights groups and thus advance women’s education nationwide.