Grace Ashiru
In Africa’s fast-growing tech ecosystem, communities are often the first real interface between talent and opportunity. They introduce people to new tools, unlock career pathways, and foster a sense of belonging in an industry that can otherwise feel distant and opaque. Yet despite their importance, the people who run these communities are rarely trained or intentionally developed. Community management is highly visible work, but the route into it is often accidental, driven by volunteering, passion, and burnout rather than structure.
This is the gap Mfonobong Umondia has spent the last four years deliberately working to close.
A Career Shaped Across Global and African Tech
An accomplished community manager with experience across global and African tech organisations, Mfonobong has built, grown, and scaled communities for companies operating at very different stages. Her professional journey spans global design platforms like Figma, early-stage tech products such as Phase, and now She Code Africa, where she has helped grow communities from scratch into thriving ecosystems with thousands of active members across the continent. Her entry point into community work, however, was not community management as a discipline. It was designed.
Working closely with design teams and collaborative tools, Mfonobong learned early that the hardest part of building products is not the interface, but alignment, helping people with different backgrounds, incentives, and communication styles work together effectively. Design reviews, workshops, and co-creation sessions became her training ground in facilitation, empathy, and systems thinking. Over time, she realised these were the same skills required to run strong communities at scale.
When Demand Outpaced Structure in Community Management
As her responsibilities expanded beyond tools and into people, a recurring pattern became impossible to ignore. Across meetups, online communities, and conferences, there was a growing demand for community managers, but almost no formal pipeline producing them. Many people wanted to do the work. Few knew how to translate their experience into a career, and even fewer had access to mentors who could show them what “good” actually looked like in practice.
She Code Africa and the Visibility of Invisible Labour
That insight deepened when she began working at She Code Africa. Within the organisation, Mfonobong saw hundreds of women contributing as organisers, moderators, and programme leads. They were already doing the work of community management—running events, managing platforms, supporting members—but without clear frameworks, professional recognition, or long-term pathways. The ecosystem depended on their labour, yet offered little structure to help them grow into sustainable roles.
Rather than treating this as an individual shortcoming, Mfonobong approached it as an infrastructure problem. Communities were scaling. Talent existed. What was missing was a deliberate system connecting aspiration to opportunity.
Designing a Mentorship Pipeline From First Principles
The mentorship pipeline she began to design is rooted in realism. It starts not with tools or platforms, but with first principles: how communities form, how engagement is sustained, how trust is built, and how impact is measured. Participants are taught to think in systems, community life cycles, incentive structures, stakeholder management, before they ever touch moderation dashboards or content calendars.
Learning is anchored in apprenticeship. Mentees are embedded within active communities and programmes, where they take on real responsibilities: planning events, moderating discussions, designing engagement strategies, tracking participation metrics, and reporting outcomes to organisational leads. This exposure does two things. It builds confidence through practice, and it makes the invisible labour of community work visible, measurable, and transferable.
Mentorship itself is intentionally plural. Drawing on her extensive network, Mfonobong brings in ecosystem leaders from across tech hubs, nonprofits, and startups to mentor cohorts collectively. This reflects the reality of community management, where practitioners must constantly balance the needs of members, partners, sponsors, and internal teams. It also prevents mentorship from becoming gatekept by a single voice or perspective.
The impact of this approach is already visible. Graduates of the pipeline now manage communities and programmes across different African tech organisations, equipped not just with enthusiasm but with language, frameworks, and strategic clarity. They are able to articulate their value, define success metrics, and position community work as a growth function rather than a side activity.
Advocating for Community Management on Global Stages
This work is reinforced by Mfonobong’s visibility and credibility within the broader ecosystem. She has spoken at over 30 conferences globally, including API Conference, Open Source Community Africa Festival, Web3 Lagos, and Google Developer Festival, often sharing stages with senior leaders and global experts. These platforms allow her to advocate publicly for community management as a profession, not just a passion, and to challenge organisations to invest properly in the people who hold their ecosystems together.
Her commitment to inclusion also runs deep. Beyond her core roles, she is a key contributor to Women Techmakers Uyo and an active mentor through programmes such as Notion Nigeria, Designlab, and Led by Community. These efforts are not separate from her pipeline work; they feed into it, creating multiple on-ramps for underrepresented talent to move from participation into leadership.
At its core, Mfonobong’s work is about reframing how the ecosystem thinks about communities. Communities are often described as organic or self-sustaining, but in reality, they require intentional design, skilled leadership, and long-term investment. By building a mentorship pipeline grounded in practice, structure, and access, she is helping professionalise a role that has long powered Africa’s tech growth from behind the scenes.
In turning informal contributions into structured opportunities, Mfonobong Umondia is not just mentoring individuals. She is building the missing infrastructure for community management itself, and in doing so, shaping how the next generation of African tech communities will be led, sustained, and valued.
