Talent Is Everywhere, Opportunity Is Not: Wasabi’s Partnership With Onja

Every March, Women's History Month creates space to recognize the women who have shaped industries and institutions that didn't always make room for them, and technology is no exception. From the earliest days of computing to today's AI-driven landscape, we reflect on women’s impact, elevate stories, and take stock of progress.

But recognition only goes so far when structural barriers are still intact. Women remain underrepresented in technology, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports: they make up 47% of the U.S. workforce, but only 27% of tech careers, with the ratio reaching 4:1 in more technical roles.

The reasons are rarely about ability. More often, they are about access: to training, to mentorship, to visible role models, and to the hiring pipelines that actually translate talent into careers. To that end, more companies are finding that looking beyond the usual pathways opens the door to talent they would have otherwise missed.

Looking beyond traditional hiring paths

When organizations rely exclusively on traditional talent pipelines (elite universities, established recruiting networks, familiar geographies), they're making assumptions about where talent lives. Teams getting this right are the ones asking a different question: not where have we always looked, but where haven't we.

Initiatives that build rigorous technical preparation and connect talented people to real career opportunities expand the hiring process rather than divert from it. Onja was built around that idea, creating a model that combines technical training with a clear pathway into real engineering roles.

Meet Onja: Turning access into opportunity

Onja is a social enterprise based in Madagascar that trains academically gifted young people to become world-class software developers. Its model is built around a rigorous two-year program combining professional coding instruction with intensive English language training, the foundation for working in a global tech environment.

Seventy percent of Onja developers are women. That figure reflects a deliberate focus on creating opportunities for talented young women in a country with limited access to advanced education and fewer economic pathways.

The program works by partnering with global tech firms to co-create meaningful career pathways for its graduates. Those partnerships aren't philanthropic arrangements. They're talent acquisition channels that happen to reach places most companies don't look.

Two developers, one rigorous process

Wasabi's engineering team hired Jeannie Peta and Clopedia Nomenjanahary in 2024 through its partnership with Onja. Their path to those roles followed the same process as any other hire: a competitive interview designed to assess technical skills, problem-solving ability, and readiness to contribute to a professional team. Our partnership with Onja created the introduction; these two developers did the rest.

Both work in front-end development, a discipline that demands technical precision and an instinct for both how people think and how systems work.

For Nomenjanahary, the path into that work started with access:

Why it matters beyond the hire

The conversation around women in tech often focuses on representation as the goal. But representation follows something more structural: whether real pathways into the field exist in the first place. When they do, outcomes change.

This talent strategy expands across gender and geographies, expanding the talent pool beyond the typical avenues, thus expanding opportunity for qualified applicants.

Pipelines that deliver technically prepared candidates, and companies willing to evaluate them fairly, don’t just benefit the developers who move through them. They strengthen the teams that hire them and expand the industry’s understanding of where talent can be found.

From recognition to results

Every Women's History Month, we celebrate the pioneers, the firsts, the ones who persisted despite the odds stacked against them. Those stories deserve to be told. But few companies pause to ask why making it through required so much in the first place, or what they're doing structurally to change that for the next generation.

That's the harder question. And it gets answered with decisions: which training programs to support, which partnerships to pursue, which hiring pipelines to build or expand.

Wasabi's partnership with Onja is an attempt at just that. It's concrete, it's replicable, and it produced two exceptional developers who are on the job right now, doing the work thanks to investments in equity and access.