Mercy Mahinda
Mercy Wangari Mahinda is a trail-blazing Kenyan mechatronics engineer championing technical excellence and gender equity in STEM. After graduating top of her class from Dedan Kimathi University of Technology in 2015, she joined Safaricom’s highly selective graduate engineering programme, rotating through radio‐access, power, and core-network departments before settling into data-centre design and operations. Her meticulous work on Safaricom’s Thika Road and Nairobi South facilities helped the telco secure Kenya’s first Tier III certification, and in 2017 she became the country’s first woman to earn the Uptime Institute’s Accredited Tier Designer credential.
Recognition soon followed. At just 26, Mahinda was named Young Engineer of the Year at the 2018 Datacloud Europe Awards in Monaco for developing an AI-assisted cooling-efficiency model that cut data-centre energy use by 18 percent. Promoted to Mechanical Engineer in 2020, she now leads Safaricom’s green-infrastructure roadmap, overseeing the rollout of lithium-ion UPS systems, rooftop solar arrays, and immersion-cooling pilots that aim to deliver 100 percent renewable-powered edge sites by 2027.
Beyond the server room, Mahinda co-founded SheBuildsKE, a mentorship collective that has introduced more than 3,000 schoolgirls to robotics and embedded-systems projects, and serves on the Women in Engineering committee of the Institution of Engineers of Kenya. Her career embodies the future of Kenyan tech, innovative, sustainable, and inclusively engineered.