Geek Girls Myanmar

The idea came from a gap that was impossible to ignore. When Sandi returned to Myanmar in 2014 after years in Singapore, she found a country in the middle of a digital awakening, mobile internet was arriving, Facebook was exploding, and technology was beginning to touch every corner of daily life. But when she looked at the people building that future, leading it, speaking at events, sitting at the top of the companies driving it, the women were largely absent. Not because they lacked talent, or curiosity, or ambition. But because no one had built the space for them to show up.

So she built it.

In September 2014, Sandi founded Geek Girls Myanmar. She expected a handful of people. More than fifty showed up to the very first meetup. That was the signal she needed.

Geek Girls Myanmar was inspired by the global Geek Girls movement, which originated in Sweden in 2008 when two women decided that the male dominance of the technology industry was something that could be organised against. Sandi brought that spirit to Myanmar and made it entirely her own. From the beginning, the community was not just about coding or software. It was about every woman who worked with technology, or wanted to, or simply believed that technology could change her life if she could find her way in. Engineers, designers, marketers, students, entrepreneurs, teachers, all of them were welcome. The tagline was simple and deliberate: geek is the new chic.

The community grew quickly. Within its first year it had become a fixture in Yangon's technology scene, running regular meetups that drew thirty to fifty women at a time and building a Facebook community that grew into the thousands. The Myanmar Times covered it. TechWire Asia covered it. CNN came. The story was the same everywhere: a woman who came home, looked around, and decided to build what was missing.

But Geek Girls Myanmar was never just a Yangon story. Over the years, Sandi took it on the road. The GeekGirls on Tour programme, delivered in partnership with the U.S. Embassy in Myanmar, brought digital literacy and technology training to women across fifteen regions of the country, reaching communities far beyond the capital that had rarely seen this kind of investment in their futures. Over one thousand women participated directly in Geek Girls Myanmar programmes, workshops, hackathons, and training sessions — learning everything from basic internet skills and social media tools to entrepreneurship, app development, and how to pitch a business idea.

The partnerships it attracted reflected the seriousness of what it was building. Meta came on board as a funding and programming partner, supporting a talk show and podcast series on hate speech, digital citizenship, and online safety that Sandi produced and hosted under the Tea Talks Myanmar banner. Google partnered on the WomenWill programme, bringing entrepreneurship training to women across Myanmar through Geek Girls Myanmar's community infrastructure. Ooredoo Myanmar supported the work from early on. The U.S. Embassy became a long-term institutional partner. Each partnership was built on the same foundation: a track record of delivery, a community that was real, and a mission that was impossible to argue with.

The community also ran a monthly spotlight programme, identifying and profiling one inspiring woman working in technology each month, a deliberate effort to make visible the women who were already in the industry but rarely seen as leaders or role models. It ran hackathons that brought women together to solve real business problems facing local entrepreneurs. It sent members to speak at Barcamp Yangon, one of Myanmar's largest technology gatherings, to share their experiences and recruit new members. It collaborated with organisations from the American Embassy to Phandeeyar, Myanmar's leading ICT hub, to connect its community with the broader technology ecosystem.

In 2021, the military coup changed everything. The community was dispersed. Many of its members fled, went underground, or had their lives upended in ways that made participating in a tech meetup feel impossibly distant. The infrastructure that had supported the work collapsed overnight. And yet Geek Girls Myanmar did not stop. It adapted, as communities built with enough care always do. It moved online. It found new ways to reach the women who needed it. It continued.

Geek Girls Myanmar is still running today. It is one of the longest-standing women-in-technology communities in Myanmar's history, and one of the few that survived the coup intact enough to keep going. It was never just a programme or a networking group or an NGO. It was a statement, made in real time, that women in Myanmar belonged in the rooms where the future was being decided — and that if those rooms did not exist yet, someone would build them.

Sandi built them. And a thousand women walked through the doors.