For someone who was nominated as one of the Top 50 Women in Cybersecurity—Africa 2020, Ruth M. Magona is a reluctant rising star.

The award ceremony, which was held during QuarterCon, Africa's Quarterly Cybersecurity Conference, recognizes women in cybersecurity in Africa who have made significant contributions to advance the industry and are shaping the path for future generations of professionals.

The top 50 finalists are compiled in collaboration with Women in Security & Resilience Alliance, a sub-network of the Security Partners' Forum.

Growing up in Sierra Leone, Magona says she wasn’t sure what she was interested in. Her father had a Ph.D. in philosophy and her mother was a medical doctor. Her older brother passed away in 2006 while serving as a futures analyst in the United Kingdom. Two years later, she lost her father, who had spent years in local politics after retiring from academia. Magona’s mother died on April 19, 2012.

After middle school, young Magona spent a year at Annie Walsh, an all-girls secondary school in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Reputed to be the oldest girls’ school south of the Sahara, legend has it that the Annie Walsh Memorial School was named after a British girl who dreamed of one day becoming a missionary. Unfortunately, Walsh's life was cut short. The story goes that on her deathbed, Walsh asked her parents that the money that would otherwise have been spent on her sea passage to Africa should go to a charitable organization. In honor of Annie, her parents provided substantial funding for the Annie Walsh Memorial School when it was started by the Church Missionary Society, a British mission society working with the Anglican Communion and Protestant Christians around the world.

In the 1977-78 school year, Magona moved to Moulsham High School in Chelmsford, the county town of Essex in England. According to the school’s website, Moulsham is an inclusive community that welcomes students from all backgrounds. During high school, Magona worked part-time at a gas station in Chelmsford.

"I pumped gas, checked tires, oil, and air, and changed as necessary," she said. "My friend's parents owned it, so I was taken home at night, and they took good care of me."

Three years later, Magona moved south to Canary Wharf, a financial and business district on the Isle of Dogs, a dock island area in London. She also began attending classes at a community college in Hackney. An ethnically diverse borough in London, Hackney famously has a mix of whites, Blacks, Asians, Chinese, Turkish, Kurdish, and a large Hasidic Jewish population.

"Whilst at Hackney Community College doing my A-level, I worked for Islington Adult Education as a community education worker and tutor, teaching English as a second language to ethnic minorities, and cooking classes, a hobby of mine," Magona said.

Once Magona gained the prized General Certificate of Education Advanced Level, or A-Level, a school leaving qualification in the United Kingdom, she went on to university. In 1990, Magona graduated from King Alfred's College, part of the University of Southampton, with a bachelor's degree in history. During her student days at King Alfred's, she traveled to the United States as part of an exchange program at the University of Southern Maine. Magona won a place with funding from her student grant and money earned from temporary administrative roles. She also served as chair of the International Club at King Alfred’s. Some of her campus achievements include encouraging diversity in a 99.9 percent white university and creating International Day with proceeds going to a local charity as well as concerts, discos, and other events.

Magona's first job as a college graduate was as an assistant project manager with London Underground Civil Engineering.

"Mel Gardner started mentoring me when I began work at London Underground, and he still is now," Magona said. "I talk to him regularly."

Since August 2018, Magona has worked as COO of Africa Risk Management and Compliance Partners.

"I worked my way up, with some luck I presume," Magona said wryly. "This role was about the right time, right place, and I was available. The UK is interesting, in that I have had some good roles, but it has been an upwards struggle," she notes.

In one position as a program manager, she was asked to assist the administrative staff with making tea and coffee for the team meeting by someone who had never met her before. In another position, she was the only Black person in a team of 20, and the only woman as well. "It meant the guys came to me for advice on wife and girlfriend crises," she recalls. "But they also supported me with training and mentoring."

Since 1995, Magona has worked for Balfour Beatty, an international infrastructure group, Siemens Business Services, the Lloyds’s Banking Group, Royal Bank of Scotland/National Westminster Bank, commonly known as NatWest, Barclays Wealth, Ealing Council, and as a consultant business analyst in the Office of The Deputy Prime Minister, United Kingdom. During the 2010s, Magona spent four years as a project manager at Atkins Ltd, a British multinational engineering, design, planning, architectural design, project management, and consulting services company. She also served as an independent consultant for a number of projects, mostly for Balfour Beatty, reviewing the UK Department of Transport bids before submission.

As a volunteer, she supported the Stroke Association in a digital project management role. Some of the projects she managed and delivered include MyStrokeGuide.com, a bespoke website including social pages and video hosting that is adaptable for different platforms and operational systems. From December 2018 to April 2019, she was an interim product officer for the Scout Association, supporting the British scouting organization by ensuring that its digital platforms were fully functional.

A few months later, across the Atlantic Ocean, the Boy Scouts of America (completely independent of UK Scouts) filed for bankruptcy, as it faced hundreds of lawsuits from men who say they were sexually abused as Scouts. The organization said it will use the Chapter 11 process to create a trust to provide compensation to victims.

Magona says she climbed the career ladder by moving to new companies.

Lateral career moves came "whenever I felt stifled," she said. "But also, taking risks in the roles I accepted. I was never afraid to ask or apply for positions I was told that I shouldn't apply for. I was lucky enough to have won some."

She also said that a focused attitude helped her meet targets. Although she started a post-graduate study in computing, which she did not finish, Magona says she has delivered complex projects on time, within budget, and to the satisfaction of the client or customer.

"I have run projects worth multiple millions and with large, complex multi-national teams," she said. "As a black woman in senior project/program management roles, I worked in banking, engineering, and IT," adding that her current role is about investing in Africa, and she took it because a friend asked her to join his startup as his COO.

"As part of my giving back, I am also chair for Tech Excellent Africa, an organization created by women to provide a platform to encourage and develop women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in Africa, but specifically in risk management, compliance, cybersecurity, IT, and project management.

“The group is run by professional African women,” Magona added. “We have an ambitious outlook on the development of girls." Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Magona has worked from home, a situation she sees as permanent for the future of work.