The SSA Community Summit 2018 Nairobi - Kenya

The Happy SSA Community Leads.

The Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) Community Summit is a summit held every year to bring together organizers of different Google Developer Groups (GDGs) from various locations in the region to share their experiences, and to inspire each other with success stories.

This year i was among the invited Organizer Leads "When i received the emails that my spot was confirmed, air ticket sent ooh I should say it was one of the best days of 2018 and when I got to Jomo Kenyatta Airport that's the time I knew it was not a dream i was really attending the SSA summit." As a WTM lead GDG Jinja i was just eager to meet other passionate community leads and learn from their experience, the summit was held in Nairobi-Kenya at Crown Plaza hotel very nice, clean and good service hotel. Now the real thing starts on Thursday 20th / September/ 2018.

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DAY 1: WOMEN TECHMAKERS SUMMIT.
An event that brought passionate and amazing women from SSA region together to share ideas. This day really caused a positive impact on my life, hearing Rosemary sharing her personal story, Cleopatra, Marlyn and Georgia sharing their experience in their communities inspired, motivated and gave me more courage, it also made me realize that as a young technologist i was on the right path.

Photos of the Women techmakers summit 2018

DAY 2: GDG SUMMIT
A powerful day of Both male and female GDG leads coming together to share and support each other. A lot of speakers presented , i was glad to see women speaking technically and showing case what they have built with their communities "Olfa this Lady listening to her talk pushed me to work so hard on Flutter again after i had given up on it when it failed to work on my machine and am happy to say flutter is now working well for me, hopefully in a few months i will be showing case my app have developed with Flutter more to that I will even be presenting "Getting started with flutter" on Devfest Jinja 2018 organized by GDG Jinja."
Another amazing and exciting part was knowing that the graphics behind our GDG t-shirts was won by a woman oops 3 kpokos to her (👊👊👊), this was still more inspiration for me to believe in myself.
The event went up to 6pm because people were just not tired of sharing, learning and connecting with each other. And from the long day, guess what happens next.....

Photos of the GDG Summit.

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PARTY!!!!!!!
Personally i had a great time and this gave me more opportunity to make more friends across Africa.

 

Some of the photos taken at the Dinner party

DAY 3: GDG DEVFEST NAIROBI 2018
This day i was overwhelmed 1,200 attendees and 200 on the waiting list till now i still wonder which tips those guys use because I would love to acquire some.
Devfest Nairobi was another day of meeting new people and learning, their agenda was so packed that it was really hard to select which session to go for because every session was worthy it but like Aniedi said "This summit is buffet, you don't have to take everything, take what is relevant to you."

The Devfest Nairobi 2018

Hopefully you can checkout the Devfest official website, perhaps, there is one organized near you.


To me this summit was inspirational, encouraging and it has challenged me to work very hard, I also made friends, learned and shared my experience with other community leads. I have a lot of plans in mind for my community and pray that God guides me through so i can achieve those plans. "I am still telling my story of 3 days in Nairobi."

Finally I would like to give five kpokos (👊👊👊👊👊) to our hardworking and supportive Google Developer Ecosystems Community Managers for Sub-Saharan Africa Aniedi Udo-Obong, Olaiwola Bolaji, to the kenya team who really worked so hard to make sure we feel at home in Nairobi Vivian Akinyi and John kimani cc: Google Africa, Google developer Group

The Organizer team