From Eastlands tinkerer to Microsoft’s Nairobi engineering chief.

Catherine Muraga’s mother was a teacher, and the marking came home with her, often late into the night. “I still remember watching my mother, a teacher, come home with piles of exam scripts to mark by hand,” she told SoftPower News, a Ugandan outlet, in May 2025. Artificial intelligence, she said, could now do that work in minutes.

She has spent the past four years making the case for that technology from inside Microsoft. Since June 2022 she has been managing director of its Africa Development Centre (ADC) in Nairobi, where engineers build identity, Microsoft 365, Windows and security products used around the world. By her count in May 2025, the centre had more than 550 staff, about 90% of them Kenyan.

On Monday 12 October 2026, those staff were told the centre’s engineering work would end, CIO Africa reported, citing an employee. Microsoft did not use the word closure. It spoke of “proposed changes” to its engineering operations in Kenya, part of a global restructuring, and said it would keep employees in the country. It has not said how many jobs will go, or what the woman who runs the centre will do next.

Dolls from old T-shirts.

Muraga grew up in Eastlands, the part of Nairobi that gave the city Sheng, and later in Ongata Rongai. She was the eldest of five. The children made their own balls, and dolls out of worn-out T-shirts, she told the Daily Nation’s Saturday Magazine. “I am the eldest in a family of five siblings, so I took to leadership naturally,” she said.

At home she was the fixer, trying to mend whatever gadget broke. At school she took the sciences and liked physics best. She went on to a degree in computer science at Africa Nazarene University.

She set herself a deadline early. “I had dreams of being a top IT leader by age 30,” she told the magazine. It took longer.

The back office.

Muraga started as an engineer at ISP Kenya. She then spent about six years at East African Breweries as team leader for information systems support, before moving to Kenya Airways, where she managed office automation and later service delivery. The work was back-end IT, she told SoftPower: databases, networks, service-desk reports and buying equipment.

Banking came next. At Stanbic Bank Kenya she rose from manager of service delivery to head of IT operations, left to become director of IT and operations at Sidian Bank, and returned to Stanbic as chief information officer. A little over a year later she was head of engineering for Kenya and South Sudan and a member of the bank’s executive team. The job covered technology, cybersecurity, data, large technology and property projects, and the bank’s operations.

Along the way she went back to the classroom, for a digital strategy programme at Columbia Business School and the Oxford Fintech Programme at Saïd Business School.

“We assess skills”

Muraga took over the ADC on 1 June 2022 from Jack Ngare, who had run it since its launch and left in April for Google Cloud. The centre was three years old. Microsoft had announced it at State House in May 2019, with engineering hubs in Nairobi and Lagos and a promise of $100m over five years. Uhuru Kenyatta had opened its Nairobi offices at Dunhill Towers on Waiyaki Way that March.

She pointed part of the job at the universities. In 2023 her engineers worked with Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) to rewrite 128 units of its computer science and computer technology degrees, adding applied machine learning, virtual reality, quantum computing and user-experience design. The same year the centre ran a 12-week course for 23 lecturers from nine universities. One of the nine was Africa Nazarene, her own.

Her hiring rule is short. “At Microsoft, we don’t ask for degrees. We assess skills,” she told SoftPower. One example she gives is a former fisherman from Kisumu who taught himself software engineering on free online courses and now works for Microsoft.

She has stayed an engineer as well. Alongside the centre, she is an engineering director for Microsoft’s identity products, still working on design and with customers.

The cuts came close before they came home. Microsoft’s global layoffs reached the Nairobi centre in March 2023. The next year the company closed the Lagos centre and said the Kenyan one was unaffected.

People are the software.

Muraga’s case for keeping that work in Africa rests on AI. Giving the keynote at the Africa Artificial Intelligence Summit at Munyonyo, outside Kampala, in May 2025, she warned of a “compute divide” and called for investment in computing power, electricity, cloud access and data governance. She asked why African schools did not teach computing early, as China and India do. “If data is the hardware of AI, people are the software,” she said.

Africans, she told SoftPower the same month, were mainly consumers of AI. She pointed to image models that could not recognise mud houses or thatched roofs. Africans, she argued, would have to build such systems themselves. In Kampala she called for models trained in African languages and on African images.

Mutura and masala tea.

Off duty, Muraga’s tastes are pure Nairobi. When Business Daily’s Weekend with the CEO column caught up with her in September 2023, her favourite food was mutura, the grilled sausage of stuffed intestines sold at roadside grills, followed by masala tea brewed strong. “If you buy me mutura, you won’t have to say you love me. I’ll just know,” she said.

She has served as president of Rafiki Toastmasters Club, a public-speaking club, and co-founded HerNovation, a leadership platform for women in technology run with dx5, the company behind CIO Africa. She has mentored women in technology for years.

Jackson Biko, profiling her for Business Daily in August 2024, described a presence “soundless in a sort of seismic way”. Behind the soft voice, he wrote, colleagues found “an unmovable firmness, a ruthlessness to excellence”.

Monday.

Microsoft has not said what happens to Muraga’s own role. The company said this week that it was speaking to employees in Kenya directly and “keeping those discussions private”. It has not said how many staff are affected, when their jobs end or whether any will move to other teams. Since July the company has cut thousands of roles worldwide and told engineering teams that more changes were coming.

The government noticed. On the day staff were told, the ICT Cabinet Secretary, William Kabogo, met a Microsoft delegation led by Jeff Bullwinkel, its deputy general counsel for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Kabogo said he had pressed for local talent to be kept and jobs at the Nairobi centre protected, and that the two sides would draw up a plan covering AI in government, cybersecurity and digital skills.

Some of what Muraga built will outlast the centre. Students who began JKUAT’s rewritten computer science degree in September 2023 are not due to graduate until 2027.

She ended her SoftPower interview with a note to her own industry. “Let’s not just consume AI. Let’s create it, shape it, and use it to solve our local challenges.” The several hundred engineers she has led, trained on software used around the world, may soon be testing that note that came as an instruction outside Microsoft.