Gladys Nelly Kimani
Gladys Nelly Kimani is a Kenyan educator-turned-tech entrepreneur and the founder of Class Teacher Network (CTN), a school-management platform that links teachers, parents, and administrators in real time. Inspired by the challenge of shepherding fifty-five pupils with little administrative support, she built CTN in 2018 to deliver attendance alerts, homework uploads, fee tracking, and CBC report cards in English and Kiswahili.
Kimani’s solution won the 2019 Women in Africa Award for Best Education Innovation, the same year Business Daily named her to Kenya’s Top 40 Under 40 Women list. What began as a two-school pilot has grown to 670 institutions across Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, serving 210,000 learners and 430,000 guardians.
In 2024 she partnered with Safaricom to integrate M-Pesa, cutting fee-arrears by thirty-five percent, and launched CTN Analytics, a dashboard that flags absenteeism and learning-loss trends for district officials. An AI homework-feedback tool released in March 2025 now trims teachers’ marking time by a third.
Holding a BEd from Kenyatta University and a Stanford Seed Transformation certificate, Kimani sits on the Ministry of Education’s Digital Learning Taskforce. Through CTN Academy she has trained 4,500 educators—seventy percent women—in digital pedagogy, demonstrating that smart technology can strengthen the teacher-parent bond and lift classroom outcomes.