I am a lawyer. That is what my certificate says, and for a long time it was what I believed my life would be built around.
But life in Nigeria has a way of stress-testing certainty.
I was already struggling — a female lawyer with one child, financially incapacitated, doing the quiet daily arithmetic of survival that nobody talks about in professional circles. Then I got pregnant with my second child. Around the same time, I relocated to Abuja — a different jurisdiction, which meant starting over in a legal market that did not know me.
I walked into chambers. I sent messages. I followed up.
The answer, again and again, was no.
Not always spoken plainly. Sometimes it was silence. Sometimes it was the particular way a door closes when you are visibly pregnant, visibly female, and visibly in need. No chamber would take me. Most would not even consider it.
Eventually I made a decision that felt like surrender: I would shelve legal practice until after the baby came.
The baby came.
And a clear reality stared me in the face. I could not go back to where I was. There was no “back.” There was only forward — and forward was completely uncharted.
I began looking at digital skills the way a drowning person looks at a rope — not strategically, but desperately. I borrowed money from online lenders. When the funds arrived, I scattered them across different courses and tools. Graphic design. Content creation. Other digital skills. I was trying everything, with a newborn on my hip and debt accumulating quietly in the background.
But underneath all the scattering, one thing kept pulling at me: coding.
Software development. The idea that I could build things — real systems, real products — with nothing but a screen, an internet connection, and persistence.
That idea changed the direction of my life.
I am not where I want to be yet. I say that honestly. But I know I am going somewhere, and that knowing matters. For a woman who once stood outside every closed door in Abuja, it means everything.
Today I am committed to building my future in technology — learning how systems work, how software is built, deployed, and improved. The more I learn, the more I realize that the digital world rewards persistence in ways that traditional systems often do not.
But this journey is not only about me.
I want the young women in my neighbourhood to see that this path exists. The boys too. The children growing up under the same financial pressure I know — watching their mothers calculate and recalculate and still come up short.
I want them to know that a skill learned on borrowed money, in the exhausted hours after a baby sleeps, is still a real skill.
That the side door is still a door.
And that you do not have to wait for the industry to invite you in before you start building.
Ndidi Nichola Okoro, Esq., is a Nigerian legal practitioner currently transitioning into software development and digital product creation.
Top comments (0)