During my engineering studies, somewhere between long nights with algorithms and a growing sense that I was still figuring out who I wanted to be, I joined a student club called N7Geeks Mohammedia, mostly out of curiosity. Through it, I got introduced to DigiGirlz Morocco. I didn't sign up because I had some grand plan to mentor the next generation of women in tech. I signed up almost on a whim, still not entirely sure it was something I actually wanted to do. What I hadn't expected was how much that whim would end up teaching me.
DigiGirlz Morocco brings together girls between fifteen and eighteen, from all kinds of backgrounds, and pairs them with university students who are already a few steps into the world they’re curious about. On paper it sounded simple: show up, share what you know, be a friendly face from a field they’re only just starting to imagine themselves in. In practice, almost none of it turned out to be simple, and that’s exactly what taught me the most.
The first challenge wasn’t technical at all. It was just getting girls into the room. Some of their parents were wary, worried about time away from schoolwork, unsure what this “tech program” actually was or what it would cost their daughters academically. So a lot of my early weeks weren’t spent teaching anything. They were spent having the same reassuring conversation over and over, in different living rooms, with different families, trying to explain why this mattered. It was slow and, honestly, a little humbling. But we kept at it, and eventually we had what we needed: ten mentees and four of us mentors, committed to seeing the program through.
It sounds almost too tidy when I say it like that. It wasn’t. None of us were mechanical or electronics specialists, we were IT students trying to design a working prototype that also had to survive contact with the real world, not just a slide deck. On top of figuring that out ourselves, we had to teach our mentees, most of whom had never touched design software before, how to actually use it well enough to contribute. There were a lot of evenings where I left feeling like I’d taught less than I’d fumbled through alongside them. But we got a working prototype together, took it to the regional competition, and won.
I wish I could tell you the story ends there, on that win. It doesn’t.
The national competition was a different mountain. We’d invested real time and real belief into the Smart Bin by then, and I was ready to keep pushing. But the baccalaureate exams landed right in the middle of our runway, and one by one, mentees started stepping back, understandably choosing their exams over a robotics project. I don’t blame a single one of them for that. But it left me holding a team that had quietly stopped being a team, and no real playbook for what to do next. Rebuilding from there wasn’t something I could do quickly. Recruiting, screening, training a new group back up to speed, that all takes time we simply didn’t have before the deadline caught up with us. In the end, the Smart Bin didn’t make it to the national stage.
For a while I felt like that meant we’d failed. I’ve since stopped thinking about it that way. The project still lives somewhere in the back of my mind, half finished, and if I ever end up building something of my own the way I hope to one day, I know exactly which idea I’m going back to first.
What I actually walked away with wasn’t a trophy from nationals. It was the ability to sit in an unfamiliar living room and convince a skeptical parent to give their daughter a chance. It was learning, the hard way, what happens to a team’s morale when the person leading it is just as unsure as everyone else, and having to lead anyway. It was watching ten girls who’d never opened a piece of design software start to actually enjoy using it. And it was a handful of friendships that outlasted the project itself, along with a much clearer sense of the kind of impact I actually want to have: not the kind that shows up neatly on a certificate, but the kind that changes how a fifteen year old sees what’s possible for her.
DigiGirlz didn’t hand me a finished success story. It handed me a much better lesson: that leadership mostly looks like showing up for people through the unglamorous parts, long before there’s anything to celebrate.