Lady Mariéme Jamme and the long work of digital freedom

The dictionary is old now. Its pages have survived years of handling and the distance between the young woman who first studied it in a Surrey library and the founder who still keeps it. Mariéme Jamme did not know then that library books could be taken home. A librarian explained the two-week loan. She borrowed the simple dictionary, sat with it, returned to its words and began to understand how language could unlock the next room.

There was no neat apprenticeship waiting for her in Britain. Jamme had arrived from a childhood divided between Senegal and France with little formal schooling and limited English. She cleaned houses and worked in bars and restaurants. For two hours a day, she went to the library. Adult education filled in basics about work and money. Words began to join. She started writing online. Then she taught herself to code, working through seven programming languages with library resources and at home.

That sequence matters because it became more than biography. It became a design brief. Give someone access to a tool. Make the rules of the room legible. Allow enough time for practice. Connect learning to a choice the learner could not make before. Jamme eventually compressed the idea into five words: “When you have skills, you become free.”

A business career with a social question

Jamme built a technology career before iamtheCODE became her public center of gravity. She founded the British consultancy SpotOne Global Solutions in 2007, working across the technology market between Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The company later became Accur8Global, an advisory business focused on questions including AI ethics, risk and governance. She co-founded Africa Gathering, started the women’s technology network JJiguene in Senegal and helped run Apps4Africa, which backed African developers working on local problems.

The work put her near governments, companies and international institutions. It also exposed a recurring gap. African technology was often discussed through infrastructure and investment, while girls were treated as an afterthought. Devices and connectivity could expand, yet the people invited to build with them remained a narrow group. Jamme’s answer was to work on the missing layer: skills, confidence, mentors and a path from learning to economic participation.

In 2013, the World Economic Forum selected her as a Young Global Leader. The network widened her access to policy and business leaders. She used that access as leverage for a problem she understood personally. iamtheCODE was established as a foundation in 2016 and developed into an African-led movement connecting governments, companies and philanthropic partners with STEAMD education. The extra letters are deliberate: science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics and design. Jamme wanted a wider frame than programming syntax alone.

“When you have skills, you become free.”Lady Mariéme Jamme

The public goal is memorable: one million girls and young women coding by 2030. The daily machinery is less tidy. There are twelve-week courses, phones and laptops, local teachers, transport, certifications, peer groups, corporate mentors and scholarships. In refugee camps, a laptop is useful only if someone has funded it, moved it, maintained it and created a reason for a learner to return next week.

Listen before opening the laptop

When iamtheCODE enters a community, Jamme says the team starts with inspiration and listening. What worries the girls? Who pays attention to them? What would make the space feel like theirs? Technical courses follow once that foundation exists. The order is part of the curriculum. It recognizes that education is a relationship before it becomes a credential.

That approach has traveled. iamtheCODE has operated in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, and in 2025 Jamme announced plans for an academy in Dadaab with UNHCR. Programs also reached Brazil, the Philippines, Georgia and South Africa. In Jamaica, she launched a Caribbean hub with local World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders alumni. The aim was regional: prove the model with Jamaican leadership, then make it easier for other English-speaking Caribbean countries to adapt.

The stories Jamme repeats are concrete. A learner in Afghanistan put her certificate on the wall and showed her father evidence of what she could do. In Kakuma, 150 girls graduated in 2024; Jamme remembered meeting many of them when they were eleven, twelve or thirteen. Some participants have earned scholarships that allow them to continue studying beyond the camp. Each example turns the million-person goal back into a person with a new option.

The movement also hands over the microphone. The iamtheCODE podcast has featured girls from Kakuma as co-hosts, interviewing guests and telling stories from their own communities. Jamme is a practiced speaker, but she has built a format where learners are heard beside her. Visibility becomes another skill: ask a question, describe your work, be recognized as someone with a point of view.

“Before the technology, we listen.”Lady Mariéme Jamme

Humanity in the boardroom

By 2026, the technology conversation had shifted sharply toward artificial intelligence. Jamme’s position followed the same logic she had applied to coding. Girls in iamtheCODE programs were learning about prompts and building AI bots. They were already participants in the field, even when conventional maps of AI talent failed to show them.

At the World Economic Forum’s Summer Davos meeting in Dalian, she put her concern in boardroom language: “When we talk about AI, we need to bring humanity into the boardroom.” The sentence is both ethical and operational. A system designed without people from marginalized communities can miss their circumstances. A company that ignores those communities as a source of talent also leaves useful intelligence outside its walls.

Accur8Global gives Jamme a route into the governance side of that argument. iamtheCODE gives her a view from classrooms and community programs. Together they let her move between policy and practice: the risk register discussed by executives, and the girl learning how an AI tool works on the device available to her. Her demand is consistent across both spaces. Technology should leave people with more agency.

Recognition has accumulated around the work. Jamme received the Innovation Award at the 2017 Global Goals Awards and was included in the BBC 100 Women list that year. She served on the World Wide Web Foundation board, joined the ITU Generation Connect Visionaries Board and became a founding member of the World Economic Forum’s Reskilling Revolution council. In 2018, she joined an Arctic expedition of 100 leaders from 42 countries. The appointments expanded the set of rooms where she could make the case.

The next room

There is a useful tension in Jamme’s story. She speaks in global targets and operates through small units of trust. One million is a fundraising and coordination device. The worn dictionary is the unit that explains the work. Somebody showed her how a public resource could be used. She stayed with it long enough to make the resource productive. She now builds systems intended to repeat that opening for someone else.

Her personality appears in the method: direct about institutional failure, impatient with inaction, patient with learners. Colleagues describe a leader willing to ask difficult questions. Her own writing adds a playful streak. She created Ikigaidance, blending the Japanese concept of ikigai with Ubuntu, and once explained coding through the making of an omelette. Instructions provide structure; the person combining them produces the result.

The demanding part of digital inclusion is rarely the slogan. It is the follow-through between a first lesson and a first credible opportunity. Jamme’s work lives in that interval. A girl opens a course on a phone. A mentor learns her name. A laptop arrives. A project gets finished. A certificate goes on a wall. A scholarship takes the learner beyond the place where the course began.

The dictionary still exists because beginnings can remain useful long after the next chapter starts. For Jamme, it is proof that literacy can alter a life one repeated page at a time. iamtheCODE is an attempt to turn that private discovery into public infrastructure. The measure of success will be larger than the number on a dashboard. It will be the number of learners who reach the next room and know how the door works.

Impact figures change as programs expand. The 88-country and 400,000-plus training figures shown here were published in Jamme’s World Economic Forum contributor profile in 2026.