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A not-for-profit organization focused on empowering African girls through education, training, and mentoring in the STEM fields founded by 2014 Tutu Fellow Lade Araba has been recognised by Google for the work it has been doing.  Google announced that the Visiola Foundation would receive a 2016 Google RISE Award for its efforts to increase access to computer science  education for youth.

The Google RISE Awards supports informal education organizations around the world that promote computer science for K-12/pre-university age youth.

Students who attended the Visiola Foundation's 2016 STEM Summer Camp for teenage girls impressed U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and American ambassadors when they visited Abuja, Nigeria. One of the projects the girls had was to make a robotic forklift (see video below). The Visiola Foundation was founded by 2014 Tutu Fellow Lade Araba.  It educates high-potential girls and young women in the STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering & Math) fields to build a pipeline of leaders and innovators who will help to transform African countries.

Tutu Fellow Lade Araba, who is a founder of the Visiola Foundation, saw a small measure of the fruits of that organisation's efforts when she accompanied two science scholars to the Next Einstein Forum for their 2016 Global Gathering in Dakar, Senegal.  It was the first time the two scholars,  Rachael Asaolu and Omolara Kassim, had been on a plane, their first time traveling outside of Nigeria, and their first time at an international conference.

Tutu Fellow Lade Araba wrote this op ed, which was originally published in This is Africa.

With 62 percent of Nigerians under the age of 24 and 49 percent of its citizens women, Nigeria stands to benefit by harnessing the creativity and intellectual curiosity of young women.

2017 Tutu Fellow Hema Vallabh spoke at a TEDx event in Johannesburg about how she realized that young girls weren’t considering becoming engineers because it was a job for men only. She tried to find the source of this misconception and found it was in the definition of traditional engineering as being a space of strength and physical ability.

She makes the case that the needs of society nowadays should be addressed with the new definition of engineering as a space of innovation and invention, which are skills that women have. She wants to bring the information to a young generation of women who otherwise might be excluded from considering the profession.