Supporting girls in tech through While She is True

It’s a rainy afternoon in Calgary, and a group of seven pre-teen girls is huddled around laptops and tablets in one of the local library’s public meeting spaces. They’re animated and engaged; their screens are filled with brightly-coloured graphics.

Are they social scrollers? Fired-up gamers? Or just a group of kids waiting out the weather?

None of the above; these girls are coders.

In fact, thanks to the volunteer team at While She is True – a Canadian not-for-profit organization “dedicated to educating, empowering, and encouraging young girls to explore and pursue careers in the technology industry” – girls aged 8-15 are honing their craft all across the country.

Spearheading it all: Ebunoluwa (Ebun) Makinde, a Masters of Computer Science student at the University of Calgary who was inspired to create While She is True based on her own experiences as one of just a few girls in the room during her own high school years.

Photo: Ebun, founder of While She is True, providing hands-on instruction to two students.

Answering the question “Am I in the right place?”

Ebun’s family moved from Nigeria to Canada in 2018. As she entered Grade 10 that year in Winnipeg, her dad encouraged her to enroll in Computer Science as one of her options… which she admits initially didn’t appeal. And while her interest was quickly piqued by the scope and creativity of her class projects, as one of just a handful of girls in a class of 30, she couldn’t shake the question: “Am I in the right place?”

By the time Grade 11 rolled around, her dinnertime Computer Science class recaps had clearly hooked her younger sister, who’d recently started coding games based on what she’d learned through her own school’s tech curriculum. “I was excited that she and her friends were showing interest, but paid coding classes weren’t an option,” Ebun explains. “So I decided to start an after-school club to teach basic programming to a few girls in my community.”

This early foray into instruction came to an abrupt end during COVID-19 lockdowns, but Ebun wasn’t discouraged, and an Introduction to Entrepreneurship course during her Bachelor of Computer Science degree only fueled the spark further.

“I felt really empowered through that course, and that’s when I decided to start my own not-for-profit organization to pick up where I left off,” Ebun says.

And so, in 2022 – while juggling a full course load – Ebun officially founded While She is True.

Photo: Ebun in 2021, working hard in the early days of her Bachelor of Computer Science degree.

Spreading the word and building the team

At first, it was all about word of mouth… and whether it was her sister recruiting friends to sign up, her mom encouraging other families to consider it for their daughters, or Ebun texting her own contacts, word spread fast. Soon enough, it was the girls in the classes and their parents who were recommending the program to their peers.

Assembly of the volunteer team was a similarly grassroots effort; she found most of her volunteers – primarily Computer Science undergrads, along with a mix of Business, Education, Electrical Engineering and even high school students! – by putting up posters around campus.

Three years later, a team of over 20 volunteers offers a mix of free in-person classes in Winnipeg and Calgary, as well as online classes available to girls all across Canada, along with a few US-based students.

Photo: While She is True’s students connecting with each other and opportunities to grow their skills in class.

Exploring the wide world of code

“Because I’m still in the process of learning myself as I complete my Master’s degree, how and what I’ve been taught is still very fresh and informs the curriculum – starting with Scratch and then building up from there,” says
Ebun.“I also do a lot of research into what paid coding classes and other not-for-profits doing similar work within
and outside of Canada are teaching, and adapt from there.”

Ebun’s also excited to share that much of what’s taught is driven by the students themselves.
“The girls come to us and tell us what they want to learn! A lot of them are very interested in learning to code games, so we’re working on a curriculum to help them do that. Others have asked to learn about web development; we’re setting our sights on that for next year as well.”

To ensure high quality instruction, While She is True keeps the teacher-to-student ratio limited to 1-7 for younger girls and online classes, and 1-10 for older students and in-person classes – a ratio they’re finding effective, as the nature of their work is technical and complex.                                    Photo: One of While She is True’s instructors explaining code loops to the students.

Planning for growth

While She is True has recently taken their message to social media to further spread the word in recruiting both students and volunteers… and it’s working. Wait lists for classes are growing, with the most limiting factor at this point being the availability of her volunteer team (the commitment is two hours per week spread over two evening or weekend sessions).

They also hired their first staff this past summer, albeit temporarily: the federal government’s Canada Summer Jobs program allowed Ebun to bring on two paid staff for the summer months, providing some much-needed help.

“Other than that, the vast majority of our funding has come through pitch competitions,” she explains. “We’re also grateful to have received funding from Tech Manitoba and some private donations.”

How Payworks is getting involved

One of these recent donations was equipment: Payworks is honoured to have supplied While She is True with 30 refurbished laptops in December. Students are required to bring their own tech to class, which can make both learning and instruction challenging because some have laptops, some have tablets… and some have nothing at all, which has meant pairing up.

“Our whole team is so grateful to Payworks for this donation,” says Ebun. “These laptops will really help us level the playing field for all the girls in the program, which will make it easier and more effective for our volunteers to teach them.”

      Photo: Ebun accepting one of 30 Payworks-supplied laptops from Maureen Kinnear, Chief Technology Officer.

“What Ebun has built from the ground up with While She is True is precisely the kind of passion-driven innovation that sparks necessary change,” says Barb Gamey, Payworks Co-Founder. “We’re honoured to help support While She is True, as their mission of inclusion is not only admirable; it’s nurturing a new generation of tech leaders who’ll bring their own unique perspectives and skills to making our world a better place.”

Our team has also gotten involved in the programming itself! Our very own Chief Technology Officer, Maureen Kinnear, brought another handful of laptops to While She is True’s August 2025 summer coding camp and provided insight into her own career path… along with her advice for their years ahead.

“The girls all inspired me that day – I was humbled by the talent and creativity in the room,” says Maureen. “To them, I say: the future of tech needs you. Speak up. Raise your voice. Your perspective is needed at the table. Your ideas matter, your questions are valuable, and your approach to solving problems is unique and necessary.”

Ebun couldn’t agree more.

“A diverse world needs a diverse population building solutions to its problems,” she states. “I see it every day, even in the perspectives and ideas showing up in While She is True’s classes. So many of their ideas are things I never would have thought of myself, and certainly aren’t reflected in the technologies that exist out there right now. We need to ensure that the tech on which we build our culture and society is inclusive of everyone out there, and to do that, we need everyone’s ideas represented.”                          Photo: Maureen chatting with a While She is True student at Payworks HQ.

How you can help (and why!)

While Ebun says she already sees a positive shift towards better gender parity in tech – “I’m a Teaching Assistant (TA), and feel like I’m seeing more women in class now than I did even when I started my own undergrad a few years ago!” – there’s still so much work to be done. And Ebun feels more connected than ever to While She is True’s mission.

“One of the kids in the program was part of a coding club at her school, but felt really isolated there,” Ebun recalls. “She said that While She is True’s classes were the first time she felt included in a tech environment. And another participant told us that she’s dreaming bigger now that she’s part of the program – she’d been thinking about going into biomedical engineering; now she’s thinking about aerospace engineering, which is an even more academically challenging path.”

What does Ebun need in order to nurture even more inspired young minds?

“Donations and volunteers!” she answers with a laugh. “Hiring administrative staff so that I can focus on programming would be a huge help. And as far as volunteers go, we’d love to engage more mentors who are already part of the tech industry to volunteer with the program, or even potentially provide internships as the girls get older.”

Reflecting on the future, Ebun is optimistic when she thinks about While She is True’s students and this past summer’s Hackathon. “These are real world challenges they were working to solve, and are ideas they came up with based on their own passions,” Ebun says. Just one example: software that translates American Sign Language to English, which one of her students developed from scratch using skills she’s learned that summer. “Our industry judges were so impressed by these girls – we heard ‘You could pitch this idea for startup funding’ more than once.”

“It feels so urgent. Seeing everything we’ve seen, we want to grow and give even more girls the opportunity to bring their ideas to life.”

            Photo: In-class instruction in Winnipeg.

If you’d like to make a donation of your own or volunteer with While She is True, please visit their website here: https://www.whilesheistrue.org/