Meet Mr. Ivan Lumala – Director & Senior Technology Officer Microsoft – 4Africa

Another Ugandan making difference — Ivan was born and raised in Uganda East Africa. He first came to the United States as a chaperon, teacher, and sound technician for the African Children’s Choir. The group was mostly orphan children 5-12 years old who were singing in the US and Canada to raise funds for orphanages in their homeland after Idi Amin.

While touring in the Seattle area, Ivan stayed with a family which offered him college tuition at a local university. He returned as a foreign student and graduated with a Computer Science degree, and later a Masters of Software Engineering degree. Mr. Lumala is a Senior Product Manager in the Microsoft Learning group, responsible for emerging countries.

About 5 years ago Ivan, his wife Loi, and 2 friends co-founded Leadership Advancement International (LAI) whose mission is to bridge the leadership gap in developing countries by educating young men and women of high leadership potential, nurturing and mentoring them to realize their potential, and facilitating their successful repatriation to their home countries.

As part of the Microsoft For Africa Initiatives innovation team, Ivan is responsible for defining and executing on a strategy to catalyze a vibrant, and sustainable profitable community of African Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) creating innovative solutions in the priority domains of Education, Health care delivery, eGovernment, Agri-vet business, and basic ICT solutions for SMEs.

Ivan has been with Microsoft for 22 years, spending more than half of that time as a Software Design Engineer in Test working on the Visual Studio development platform. He then spent 5 years in Platform Evangelism where, as an Academic Developer Evangelist, he worked with university faculty and researchers to build curriculum and research on Microsoft platforms.

Before joining the 4Afrika Initiative, worked in various Product Management roles, most recently in the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group responsible for the enabling strategy for the 500K+ Microsoft partners to embrace the cloud business model.

Mr. Ivan Lumala will be among our recipients – for the 2014 Ugandan Diaspora Awards at Kampala Serena Hotel – Save the date 30th December 2014!

To learn more about this year’s gala visit our event website http://www.ugandandiaspora.com/ to learn more about — Microsoft4Africa see link  http://www.microsoft.com/africa/4afrika/