Women Powering the Oppnergy Community: Meet Ndam Albright Mayah 

Community Spotlight | Women’s Month

Ndam Albright Mayah is the kind of person who walks into a room and changes the temperature of it. She is a biomedical engineer and a spoken word artist, and she moves between those two worlds so naturally that it quickly becomes clear they were never separate to begin with. Both are just different tools for the same purpose: making people’s lives better.

This Women’s Month, we are celebrating someone who has used science and art, in equal measure, to fight for things that matter. Patient safety. Menstrual dignity. Youth opportunity. She is doing all of it from Bamenda, Northwest Region, Cameroon, and she is doing it with an energy that is impossible to miss.

So, Who Is Albright?

Albright is a Biomedical Engineering student at the National Higher Polytechnic Institute, University of Bamenda. She is building a career at the meeting point of health technology and human impact, driven by the belief that good engineering is not separate from the real lives it touches.

Yet Albright is not just an engineer. She is also a creative writer, public speaker, and spoken word artist, and she uses all of those skills to take on issues that technical reports alone cannot reach. From menstrual health to patient care, she meets her audience where they are and makes sure they leave with something new.

Within the Oppnergy community, she is known as Miss Mayah. Furthermore, she has already made her mark through sessions that open minds and push people to think bigger about what they are capable of. Her profile on the Oppnauts page only hints at the energy she brings to every room she walks into.

The Innovation That Puts Lives First

When Albright entered SDG Innovate Cameroon 2025, she came with a problem she genuinely cared about. Every day in hospitals across Cameroon, patients face risks that better technology could prevent. IV drips run dry without anyone noticing. Vital signs shift without being caught in time. These are small failures with serious outcomes.

Her answer was the Smart Health Monitoring System, a real-time patient tracking platform that monitors IV drip levels, heart rate, and body temperature all at once. As a result, the system is built to cut down on human error, improve patient outcomes, and give hospital staff the visibility that saves lives. Her project reached the finals of SDG Innovate Cameroon 2025, which is a strong sign of both the problem’s importance and the quality of her thinking.

The project covers several key areas of patient care:

• Real-time tracking of IV drip levels, heart rate, and body temperature in one joined-up system
• Designed to cut the workload on nurses and reduce human oversight errors in hospital wards
• Aligned with SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being) and the push for accessible healthcare technology across Africa
• Built with the real limits of Cameroon’s healthcare setting in mind

That final point matters most. Albright is not designing for a perfect scenario. Instead, she is designing for the hospitals she knows, the nurses who are stretched thin, and the patients who deserve better care. That honesty is what makes her work land.

Using Every Tool Available: Advocacy Through Spoken Word

If the Smart Health Monitoring System shows you how Albright thinks as an engineer, her spoken word work shows you how she thinks as a person. In 2025, she won the Menstrual Hygiene Management Creative Video and Slam Poetry Competition organised by CAGEAD. However, she was not simply entering a contest. She was raising her voice for something that too many people are still afraid to name out loud.

Her advocacy centres on safe, free, and stigma-free menstrual health access in schools and communities across Cameroon. This work is not a side project. In fact, it is an extension of the same belief that runs through everything she does: that people deserve care, dignity, and access to what they need in order to grow.

Using spoken word to talk about public health is not the obvious choice, and that is exactly why it works so well. Poetry moves past barriers that data alone cannot cross. It draws in the people who would tune out a statistic but lean forward for a story. Albright knows that, and she puts it to use.

How She Shows Up: An Oppnaut Who Gives Back

Ask anyone who has sat in a session with Miss Mayah and they will say the same thing: she lifts the energy of a room. At Oppnergy, she contributes through teaching, conversation, and encouragement. Moreover, she lives out the community’s core values of sharpening competence, strengthening character, and making the most of every opportunity.

What she brings to the Oppnergy community is rare. Rather than choosing between being technical and being expressive, she holds both at once. She proves that you can build systems and build people, pursue innovation and pursue justice, all at the same time and without losing any ground.

Beyond Oppnergy sessions, she also keeps investing in her own development. She joins public speaking training programmes and reading challenges run by leaders’ book clubs, building the kind of discipline that shows up in everything she does. To learn more about the community that shapes and supports people like Albright, visit the About page and see what Oppnergy is built on.

The Numbers Behind the Need

Albright works in a field where the numbers are still stacked against young women, and she knows it. That awareness is part of what drives her.

According to UNDP Africa, fewer than 30% of tech and STEM roles across Sub-Saharan Africa are held by women. Furthermore, McKinsey research shows that fewer than 12% of tech leadership roles on the continent go to women. In the biomedical and health technology space, those figures are even lower. However, young women like Albright are steadily closing that gap, one project, one poem, and one session at a time.

As UN Women highlights during Women’s Month, lasting change comes from people who keep showing up in spaces where they have not always been welcome. Albright does that steadily, and she does it while building a track record that is harder and harder to look past.

To Albright, From Oppnergy: With Gratitude and Pride 

Some people enter a community and take from it. Others arrive and start giving straight away. Albright is the second kind, and Oppnergy has been richer for it since the moment she joined.

She is building technology that could protect patients in hospital wards across Cameroon. Through her spoken word work, she is protecting dignity in schools and communities. In Oppnergy sessions, she leaves people more capable and more confident than when she found them.

Albright, every version of what you do matters. The engineer and the poet are both you. So is the advocate, the Oppnaut, and the woman who walks into a room and simply will not let it stay the same. All of it counts, and all of it is seen.

Above all, you are proof of what this community celebrates most: that talent, hard work, and the right opportunities together create something extraordinary. We are proud of you, and we are grateful you are one of ours.

Here is to biomedical brilliance, spoken word power, and every room you are still going to walk into and change. Here is to you, Albright. 

 

Connect with Albright directly on her LinkedIn and follow her journey in biomedical engineering and advocacy.

See more inspiring stories on the Oppnauts page and discover what community members across Cameroon are building.

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