Rebecca Enonchong is a technology entrepreneur and also the founder and CEO of AppsTech. She is best known for her work promoting technology in Africa.
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Enonchong is the Chair of ActivSpaces (African Center for Technology Innovation and Ventures). She is also founder and CEO of I/O Spaces, an incubator for the African diaspora in the U.S. She is also the Board Chair of AfriLabs and a founding member of the African Business Angel Network (ABAN).
AppsTech is a leading global provider of enterprise application solutions. They offer a full spectrum of products and services to serve all their enterprise software requirements, from architecting a solution, license sales, implementation, integration, training and application management services.
Enonchong was born in 1967. Her father was Dr Henry Ndifor Abi Enonchong, who was a well-known barrister in Cameroon. While Enonchong was growing up in Cameroon, her father helped create the Federal Cameroon Bar Association and its successor, the Cameroon Bar Association.
In her teens, Rebecca moved to the US with her family. While studying, she took up a job selling door-to-door newspaper subscriptions from the age of 15. She later became a manager at the same company at the age of 17.
Rebecca attended the Catholic University of America, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree and also a Master of Science degree in Economics.
After finishing her education, she went on to work for a number of organisations including Inter-American Development Bank (IaDB) and Oracle Corporation.
On her love for computers, she says she was working at a hotel in finance and accounting. She happened to have one of the powerful computers because she had to do a lot of financial analysis and modelling. That was when she discovered her love for computers. She was one of those people who would be in line when a new version of software came out. “That’s really how it started. And I’ve never stopped loving technology. I adore it.” She says.
In 1999, Enonchong founded the company AppsTech, a Bethesda, Maryland-based global provider of enterprise application solutions. AppsTech is an Oracle Platinum Partner and has customers in over 40 countries.
In 2002, The World Economic Forum of Davos, Switzerland named Enonchong a Global Leader for Tomorrow (GLT) along with other tech entrepreneurs such as Google co-founder Larry Page and Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.
In 2013, Rebecca was recognized as a finalist for the African digital woman award. In March 2014, Forbes listed her as one of the ‘10 Female Tech Founders to Watch in Africa’.
Rebecca has spent much of her career promoting technology in Africa. She has carried out the work in both the U.S. and in Africa. She was the founder and Chairperson of the Africa Technology Forum, a non-profit dedicated to helping technology startups in Africa.
Sharing on managing her business, she has this to say “To be honest, for a long time, I didn’t handle it very well. I would say for the first 10 years I hardly slept. I kept really long hours. And it definitely took a toll on me. I would work myself to exhaustion and then be dysfunctional for weeks. At some point, I knew this had to stop. So now, I programme time specifically to re-charge.” she states.
Rebecca understood early enough, the intricacies with being a female African CEO, so at the early stage of her business, she admits that “it can be tough in the beginning when you are trying to get your foot in the door.” She further acknowledges that she hid behind a corporate structure nevertheless, after a while; she shrugged it off, there was no need to hide behind that anymore because according to her, “what matters is your ability to deliver. One of the reasons I love technology is that it is a great equalizer”. Rebecca says.
