Grace Mukendi, Peach Payments

As a schoolgirl in Pretoria, Grace Mukendi’s first choice of a possible career was in medicine. Her father wanted her to be a doctor, but it was a short-lived ambition. After she dug into the specifics, Mukendi says, she was very clear that she wouldn’t be studying for six or so years for something she wasn’t passionate about.

The problem was there was no clear alternative for her. Here, again, her father had an idea. “One day, he came to me and said, ‘Why don’t you try this thing, IT?’ I didn’t know what it was. He said ‘computers’, and I immediately said no, I don’t like them. I was a total technophobe.” But her father wasn’t easily dissuaded this time. “He said he thinks that this – computers, IT – is where the world is going.”