Pressure points: innovation and agency.
If the Girlcoder Club is where Pipeline begins, the Girlcode Hackathon is where she faces her first serious test.
On September 19 and 20, 2026, Truecaller is co-sponsoring GirlCode's annual hackathon for 18-25 year olds. It is a 30-hour all-female coding marathon that will bring together 100 women developers, data scientists, UX designers and entrepreneurs. This year's innovation goes further: instead of creating hypothetical solutions, participants will be paired directly with female tech founders to co-develop minimum viable products for real SMEs facing real challenges.
GirlCode is hosting this hackathon simultaneously in nine countries across Africa. The scale is extraordinary, but what I find most compelling is the personal experience it creates – a young woman who arrives without knowing whether she belongs, who works all night on something she's never made before, and who presents herself the next morning with that quiet certainty that comes from proving something to herself.
Hackathons, when done well, create evidence. They give young women something to point to and say: I made it, I solved it, I earned my place here. And in an industry where belonging is still challenged for women – especially for women of color, who face compounding barriers of economic marginalization and inherited schooling inequity – this evidence matters a lot.
Retention gap: The part we don't talk about enough.
There's a part of this pipeline that gets the least attention: While we invest heavily in getting women into tech, we invest relatively little in keeping them there.
Women who move into senior digital roles – who have overcome educational gaps, workplace culture, informal exclusion – often find themselves isolated in a different way. They're economically active, they're visible, they're also often without the kind of community that supports people in difficult career transitions: a peer group that shares their language, their pressures, their specific experience of navigating institutions that weren't built for them.
This is the problem that Traversing Liminality was created to solve. Traversing Liminality is a foundation that helps young, African women ages 21 to 40 in 22 African countries overcome limiting beliefs, deepen self-mastery, and access personal and professional growth opportunities. Central to their work are regional engagements, which are localized gatherings in Johannesburg, Cape Town and KwaZulu-Natal that act as anchor locations where women completing Traversing Liminality's fellowship program can continue to connect, reflect and support each other.
Truecaller is proud to fund and co-curate these regional connections in 2026. What you see in practice is not what you might expect. At our May Connect in Cape Town, the afternoon began with an Amazing Race experience, followed by a facilitated reflection conversation on leading authentically in a connected world, and concluding with a session on digital security, identity protection, and what trust really means in the online spaces that professional women inhabit daily.
There is a lot of intentionality involved in these relationships, such as fostering opportunities for honesty and safety as prerequisites for real growth.